To Ella, Maldoror and those who helped this
adventure upon its way. "I LIVE ON THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE
AND I DON"T NEED TO FEEL SECURE."

"Man walketh in a vain shew,
he shews to be a man, and that's all."

We seem to live in the State of variety,
wherein we are not truly living but only in appearance: in Unity
is our life: in one we are, from one divided, we are no longer.

While we perambulate variety, we
walk but as so many Ghosts or Shadows in it, that it self being
but the Umbrage of the Unity.

The world travels perpetually, and
every one is swoln full big with particularity of interest; thus
travelling together in pain, and groaning under enmity: labouring
to bring forth some one thing, some another, and all bring forth
nothing but wind and confusion.

Consider, is there not in the best
of you a body of death? Is not the root of rebellion planted in
your natures? Is there not also a time for this wicked one to
be revealed?

You little think, and less know,
how soon the cup of fury may be put into your hands: my self,
with many others, have been made stark drunk with that wine of
wrath, the dregs whereof (for ought I know) may fall to your share
suddenly."

From: "Heights in Depths and Depths
in Heights (or TRVTH no less secretly than sweetly sparkling out
its Glory from under a cloud of Obloquie)" by the Ranter
Jo. Salmon (1651).

Introduction

I have no intention of revealing what there is of my life in this
book to readers who are not prepared to relive it. I await the
day when it will lose and find itself in a general movement of
ideas, just as I like to think that the present conditions will
be erased from the memories of men.

The world must be remade; all the specialists in reconditioning
will not be able to stop it. Since I do not want to understand
them, I prefer that they should not understand me.

As for the others, I ask for their goodwill with a humility they
will not fail to perceive. I should have liked a book like this
to be accessible to those minds least addled by intellectual jargon;
I hope I have not failed absolutely. One day a few formulae will
emerge from this chaos and fire point-blank on our enemies. Till
then these sentences, read and re-read, will have to do their
slow work. The path toward simplicity is the most complex of all,
and here in particular it seemed best not to tear away from the
commonplace the tangle of roots which enable us to transplant
it into another region, where we can cultivate it to our own profit.

I have never pretended to reveal anything new or to launch novelties
onto the culture market. A minute correction of the essential
is more important than a hundred new accessories. All that is
new is the direction of the current which carries commonplaces
along.

For as long as there have been men -- and men who read Lautréamont
-- everything has been said and few people have gained anything
from it. Because our ideas are in themselves commonplace, they
can only be of value to people who are not.

The modern world must learn what it already knows, become what
it already is, by means of a great work of exorcism, by conscious
practice. One can escape from the commonplace only by manhandling
it, mastering it, steeping it in dreams, giving it over to the
sovereign pleasure of subjectivity. Above all I have emphasized
subjective will, but nobody should criticize this until they have
examined the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary
world are furthering the cause of subjectivity day by day. Everything
starts from subjectivity, and nothing stops there. Today less
than ever.

From now on the struggle between subjectivity and what degrades
it will extend the scope of the old class struggle. It revitalizes
it and makes it more bitter. The desire to live is a political
decision. We do not want a world in which the guarantee that we
will not die of starvation is bought by accepting the risk of
dying of boredom.

The man of survival is man ground up by the machinery of hierarchical
power, caught in a mass of interferences, a tangle of oppressive
techniques whose rationalization only awaits the patient programming
of programmed minds.

The man of survival is also self-united man, the man of total
refusal. Not a single instant goes by without each of us living
contradictorily, and on every level of reality, the conflict between
oppression and freedom, and without this conflict being strangely
deformed, and grasped at the same time in two antagonistic perspectives:
the perspective of power and the perspective of supersession.
The two parts of this book, devoted to the analysis of these two
perspectives, should thus be approached, not in succession, as
their arrangement demands, but simultaneously, since the description
of the negative founds the positive project and the positive project
confirms negativity. The best arrangement of a book is none at
all, so that the reader can discover his own.

Where the writing fails it reflects the failure of the reader
as a reader, and even more as a man. If the element of boredom
it cost me to write it comes through when you read it, this will
only be one more argument demonstrating our failure to live. For
the rest, the gravity of the times must excuse the gravity of
my tone. Levity always falls short of the written words or overshoots
them. The irony in this case will consist in never forgetting
that.

This book is part of a current of agitation of which the
world has not heard the last. It sets forth a simple contribution,
among others, to the recreation of the international revolutionary
movement. Its importance had better not escape anybody, for nobody,
in time, will be able to escape its conclusions.

My subjectivity and the Creator :
This is too much for one brain.
-- LAUTRÉAMONT

PART ONE

POWER'S PERSPECTIVE

I THE INSIGNIFICANT SIGNIFIED

Because of its increasing triviality,
everyday life has gradually become our central preoccupation (1).
No illusion, sacred or deconsecrated (2), collective or individual,
can hide the poverty of our daily actions any longer (3). The
enrichment of life calls inexorably for the analysis of the new
forms taken by poverty, and the perfection of the old weapons
of refusal (4).

1

The history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters
who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so
that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air;
but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.

Contemporary thought, like Bosustov's heroes, can no longer rest
on its own delusions. What used to hold it up, today brings it
down. It rushes full tilt in front of the reality that will crush
it: the reality that is lived every day.

*

Is this dawning lucidity essentially new? I don't think so. Everyday
life always produces the demand for a brighter light, if only
because of the need which everyone feels to walk in step with
the march of history. But there are more truths in twenty-four
hours of a man's life than in all the philosophies. Even a philosopher
cannot ignore it, for all his self-contempt; and he learns this
self-contempt from his consolation, philosophy. After somersaulting
onto his own shoulders to shout his message to the world from
a greater height, the philosopher finishes by seeing the world
inside out; and everything in it goes askew, upside down, to persuade
him that he is standing upright. But he cannot escape his own
delirium; and refusing to admit it simply makes it more uncomfortable.

The moralists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ruled
over a stockroom of commonplaces, but took such pains to conceal
this that they built around it a veritable palace of stucco and
speculation. A palace of ideas shelters but imprisons lived experience.
From its gates emerges a sincere conviction suffused with the
Sublime Tone and the fiction of the 'universal man', but it breathes
with perpetual anguish. The analyst tries to escape the gradual
sclerosis of existence by reaching some essential profundity;
and the more he alienates himself by expressing himself according
to the dominant imagery of his time (the feudal image in which
God, monarchy and the world are indivisibly united), the more
his lucidity photographs the hidden face of life, the more it
'invents' the everyday.

Enlightenment philosophy accelerated the descent towards the concrete
insofar as the concrete was in some ways brought to power with
the revolutionary bourgeoisie. From the ruin of Heaven, man fell
into the ruins of his own world. What happened? Something like
this: ten thousand people are convinced that they have seen a
fakir's rope rise into the air, while as many cameras prove that
it hasn't moved an inch. Scientific objectivity exposes mystification.
Very good, but what does it show us? A coiled rope, of absolutely
no interest. I have little to choose between the doubtful pleasure
of being mystified and the tedium of contemplating a reality which
does not concern me. A reality which I have no grasp on, isn't
this the old lie re-conditioned, the ultimate stage of mystification?

From now on the analysts are in the streets. Lucidity isn't their
only weapon. Their thought is no longer in danger of being imprisoned,
either by the false reality of gods, or by the false reality of
technocrats!

2

Religious beliefs concealed man from himself; their Bastille walled
him up in a pyramidal world with God at the summit and the king
just below. Alas, on the fourteenth of July there wasn't enough
freedom to be found among the ruins of unitary power to prevent
the ruins themselves from becoming another prison. Behind the
rent veil of superstition appeared, not naked truth, as Meslier
had dreamed, but the birdlime of ideologies. The prisoners of
fragmentary power have no refuge from tyranny but the shadow of
freedom.

Today there is not an action or a thought that is not trapped
in the net of received ideas. The slow fall-out of particles of
the exploded myth spreads sacred dust everywhere, choking the
spirit and the will to live. Constraints have become less occult,
more blatant; less powerful, more numerous. Docility no longer
emanates from priestly magic, it results from a mass of minor
hypnoses: news, culture, town-planning, publicity, mechanisms
of conditioning and suggestion in the service of any order, established
or to come. We are like Gulliver lying stranded on the Lilliputian
shore with every part of his body tied down; determined to free
himself, he looks keenly around him: the smallest detail of the
landscape, the smallest contour of the ground, the slightest movement,
everything becomes a sign on which his escape may depend. The
most certain chances of liberation are born in what is most familiar.
Was it ever otherwise? Art, ethics, philosophy bear witness: under
the crust of words and concepts, the living reality of non-adaptation
to the world is always crouched, ready to spring. Since neither
gods nor words can mange to cover it up decently any longer, this
commonplace creature roams naked in railway stations and vacant
lots; it confronts you at each evasion of yourself, it touches
your elbow, catches your eye; and the dialogue begins. You must
lose yourself with it or save it with you.

3

Too many corpses strew the paths of individualism and collectivism.
Under two apparently contradictory rationalities has raged an
identical gangsterism, an identical oppression of the isolated
man. The hand which smothered Lautréamont returned to strangle
Serge Yesenin; one died in the lodging house of his landlord Jules-Françoise
Dupuis, the other hung himself in a nationalized hotel. Everywhere
the law is verified: "There is no weapon of your individual
will which, once appropriated by others, does not turn against
you." If anyone says or writes that practical reason must
henceforth be based upon the rights of the individual and the
individual alone, he invalidates his own proposition if he doesn't
invite his audience to make this statement true for themselves.
Such a proof can only be lived, grasped from the inside. That
is why everything in the notes which follow should be tested and
corrected by the immediate experience of everyone. Nothing is
so valuable that it need not be started afresh, nothing is so
rich that it need not be enriched constantly.

*

Just as we distinguish in private life between what a man thinks
and says about himself and what he really is and does, everyone
has learned to distinguish the rhetoric and the messianic pretensions
of political parties from their organization and real interests:
what they think they are, from what they are. A man's illusions
about himself and others are not basically different from the
illusions which groups, classes, and parties have about themselves.
Indeed, they come from the same source: the dominant ideas, which
are the ideas of the dominant class, even if they take an antagonistic
form.

The world of isms, whether it envelops the whole of humanity
or a single person, is never anything but a world drained of reality,
a terribly real seduction by falsehood. The three crushing defeats
suffered by the Commune, the Spartakist movement and the Kronstadt
sailors showed once and for all what bloodbaths are the outcome
of three ideologies of freedom: liberalism, socialism, and Bolshevism.
However, before this could be universally understood and admitted,
bastard or hybrid forms of these ideologies had to vulgarize their
initial atrocity with more telling proofs: concentration camps,
Lacoste's Algeria, Budapest. The great collective illusions, anaemic
after shedding the blood of so many men, have given way to the
thousands of pre-packed ideologies sold by consumer society like
so many portable brain-scrambling machines. Will it need as much
blood again to show that a hundred thousand pinpricks kill as
surely as a couple of blows with a club?

*

What am I supposed to do in a group of militants who expect me
to leave in the cloakroom, I won't say a few ideas -- for my ideas
would have led me to join the group -- but the dreams and desires
which never leave me, the wish to live authentically and without
restraint? What's the use of exchanging one isolation, one monotony,
one lie for another? When the illusion of real change has been
exposed, a mere change of illusion becomes intolerable. But present
conditions are precisely these: the economy cannot stop making
us consume more and more, and to consume without respite is to
change illusions at an accelerating pace which gradually dissolves
the illusion of change. We find ourselves alone, unchanged, frozen
in the empty space behind the waterfall of gadgets, family cars
and paperbacks.

people without imagination are beginning to tire of the importance
attached to comfort, to culture, to leisure, to all that destroys
imagination. This means that people are not really tired of comfort,
culture and leisure but of the use to which they are put, which
is precisely what stops us enjoying them.

The affluent society is a society of voyeurs. To each his own
kaleidoscope: a tiny movement of the fingers and the picture changes.
You can't lose: two fridges, a mini-car, TV, promotion, time to
kill... then the monotony of the images we consume gets the upper
hand, reflecting the monotony of the action which produces them,
the slow rotation of the kaleidoscope between finger and thumb.
There was no mini-car, only an ideology almost unconnected with
the automobile machine. Flushed with Pimm's No.1, we savour a
strange cocktail of alcohol and class struggle. Nothing surprising
any more, there's the rub! The monotony of the ideological spectacle
makes us aware of the passivity of life: survival. Beyond the
pre-fabricated scandals - Scandale perfume, Profumo scandal -
a real scandal appears, the scandal of actions drained of their
substance to the profit of an illusion which the failure of its
enchantment renders more odious every day. Actions weak and pale
from nourishing dazzling imaginary compensations, actions pauperized
by enriching lofty speculations into which they entered like menials
through the ignominious category of 'trivial' or 'commonplace',
actions which today are free but exhausted, ready to lose their
way once more, or expire under the weight of their own weakness.
There they are, in every one of you, familiar, sad, newly returned
to the immediate, living reality which was their birthplace. And
here you are, bewildered and lost in a new prosaism, a perspective
in which near and far coincide.

4

The concept of class struggle constituted the first concrete,
tactical marshalling of the shocks and injuries which men live
individually; it was born in the whirlpool of suffering which
the reduction of human relations to mechanisms of exploitation
created everywhere in industrial societies. It issued from a will
to transform the world and change life.

Such a weapon needed constant adjustment. yet we see the First
International turning its back on artists by making workers' demands
the sole basis of a project which Marx had shown to concern all
those who sought, in the refusal to be slaves, a full life and
a total humanity. Lacenaire, Borel, Lassailly, Buchner, Baudelaire,
Hölderlin - wasn't this also misery and its radical refusal?
perhaps this mistake was excusable then: I neither know nor care.
What is certain is that it is sheer madness a century later, when
the economy of consumption is absorbing the economy of production,
and the exploitation of labour power is submerged by the exploitation
of everyday creativity. The same energy is torn from the worker
in his hours of work and in his hours of leisure to drive
the turbines of power, which the custodians of the old theory
lubricate sanctimoniously with their purely formal opposition.

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring
explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive
about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints,
such people have corpses in their mouths.

The economy of everyday life is based
on a continuous exchange of humiliations and aggressive attitudes.
It conceals a technique of wear and tear (usure), which is itself
prey to the gift of destruction which it invites contradictorily
(1). Today, the more man is a social being the more he is an object
(2). Decolonisation has not yet begun (3). It will have to give
a new value to the old principle of sovereignty (4).

1

One day, when Rousseau was travelling through a crowded village,
he was insulted by a yokel whose spirit delighted the crowd. Rousseau,
confused and discountenanced, couldn't think of a word in reply
and was forced to take to his heels amidst the jeers of the crowd.
By the time he had finally regained his composure and thought
of a thousand possible retorts, any one of which would have silenced
the joker once and for all, he was at two hours distance from
the village.

Aren't most of the trivial incidents of everyday life like this
ridiculous adventure? but in an attenuated and diluted form, reduced
to the duration of a step, a glance, a thought, experienced as
a muffled impact, a fleeting discomfort barely registered by consciousness
and leaving in the mind only the dull irritation at a loss to
discover its own origin? The endless minuet of humiliation and
its response gives human relationships an obscene hobbling rhythm.
In the ebb and flow of the crowds sucked in and crushed together
by the coming and going of suburban trains, and coughed out into
streets, offices, factories, there is nothing but timid retreats,
brutal attacks, smirking faces and scratches delivered for no
apparent reason. Soured by unwanted encounters, wine turns to
vinegar in the mouth. Innocent and good-natured crowds? What a
laugh! Look how they bristle up, threaten on every side, clumsy
and embarrassed in the enemy's territory, far, very far from themselves.
Lacking knives, they learn to use their elbows and their eyes.

There is no intermission, no truce between attackers and attacked.
A flux of barely perceptible signs assails the walker, who is
not alone. Remarks, gestures, glances tangle and collide, miss
their aim, ricochet like bullets fired at random, which kill even
more surely by the continuous nervous tension they produce. All
we can do is to enclose ourselves in embarrassing parentheses;
like these fingers (I am writing this on a cafe terrace) which
slide the tip across the table and the fingers of the waiter which
pick it up, while the faces of the two men involved, as if anxious
to conceal the infamy which they have consented to, assume an
expression of utter indifference.

From the point of view of constraint, everyday life is governed
by an economic system in which the production and consumption
of insults tends to balance out. The old dream of the theorists
of perfect competition thus finds its real perfection in the customs
of a democracy given new life by the lack of imagination of the
left. Isn't it strange, at first sight, to see the fury with which
'progressives' attack the ruined edifice of free enterprise, as
if the capitalists, its official demolition gang, had not themselves
already planned its nationalized reconstruction? but it is not
so strange, in fact: for the deliberate purpose of keeping all
attention fastened on critiques which have already been overtaken
by events (after all, anybody can see that capitalism is gradually
finding its fulfillment in a planned economy of which the Soviet
model is nothing but a primitive form) is to conceal the fact
that the only reconstruction of human relationships envisaged
is one based upon precisely this economic model, which, because
it is obsolete, is available at a knock-down price. Who can fail
to notice the alarming persistence with which 'socialist' countries
continue to organize life along bourgeois lines? Everywhere it's
hats off to family, marriage, sacrifice, work, inauthenticity,
while simplified and rationalized homeostatic mechanisms reduce
human relationships to 'fair' exchanges of deference and humiliation.
And soon, in the ideal democracy of the cyberneticians, everyone
will earn without apparent effort a share of unworthiness which
he will have the leisure to distribute according to the finest
rules of justice. Distributive justice will reach its apogee.
Happy the old men who live to see the day!

For me -- and for some others, I dare to think -- there can be
no equilibrium in malaise. Planning is only the antithesis of
the free market. Only exchange has been planned, and with it the
mutual sacrifice which it entails. But if the word 'innovation'
is to keep its proper meaning, it must mean superseding, not tarting
up. In fact, a new reality can only be based on the principle
of the gift. Despite their mistakes and their poverty,
I see in the historical experiences of workers' councils (1917,
1921, 1934, 1956), and in the pathetic search for friendship and
love, a single and inspiring reason not to despair over present
'reality'. Everything conspires to keep secret the positive character
of such experiences; doubt is cunningly maintained as to their
real importance, even their existence. By a strange oversight,
no historian has ever taken the trouble to study how people actually
lived during the most extreme revolutionary moments. At such times,
the wish to make an end of free exchange in the market of human
behaviour shows itself spontaneously but in the form of negation.
When malaise is brought into question it shatters under the onslaught
of a greater and denser malaise.

In a negative sense, Ravachol's bombs or, closer to our own time,
the epic of Caraquemada dispel the confusion which reigns around
the total rejection -- manifested to a varying extent, but manifested
everywhere -- of relationships based on exchange and compromise.
I have no doubt, since I have experienced it so many times, that
anyone who passes an hour in the cage of constraining relationships
feels a profound sympathy for Pierre-François Lacenaire
and his passion for crime. The point here is not to make an apology
for terrorism, but to recognize it as an action -- the most pitiful
action and at the same time the most noble -- which is capable
of disrupting and thus exposing the self-regulating mechanisms
of the hierarchical social community. Inscribed in the logic of
an unlivable society, murder thus conceived can only appear as
the concave form of the gift. it is that absence of an
intensely desired presence that Mallarmé described; the
same Mallarmé who, at the trial of the Thirty, called the
anarchists 'angels of purity'.

My sympathy for the solitary killer ends where tactics begin;
but perhaps tactics need scouts driven by individual despair.
However that may be, the new revolutionary tactics -- which will
be based indissolubly on the historical tradition and on the practice,
so widespread and so disregarded, of individual realization --
will have no place for people who only want to mimic the gestures
of Ravachol or Bonnot. But on the other hand these tactics will
be condemned to theoretical hibernation if they cannot, by other
means, attract collectively the individuals whom isolation
and hatred for the collective lie have already won over to the
rational decision to kill or to kill themselves. No murderers
-- and no humanists either! The first accept death, the second
impose it. let ten men meet who are resolved on the lightning
of violence rather than the long agony of survival; from this
moment, despair ends and tactics begin. Despair is the infantile
disorder of the revolutionaries of everyday life.

I still feel today my adolescent admiration for outlaws, not because
of an obsolete romanticism but because they expose the alibis
by which social power avoids being put right on the spot.
Hierarchical social organization is like a gigantic racket whose
secret, precisely exposed by anarchist terrorism, is to place
itself out of reach of the violence it gives rise to, by consuming
everybody's energy in a multitude of irrelevant struggles. (A
'humanized' power cannot allow itself recourse to the old methods
of war and genocide.) The witnesses for the prosecution can hardly
be suspected of anarchist tendencies. The biologist Hans Selye
states that "as specific causes of disease (microbes, undernourishment)
disappear, a growing proportion of people die of what are called
stress diseases, or diseases of degeneration caused by stress,
that is, by the wear and tear resulting from conflicts, shocks,
nervous tension, irritations, debilitating rhythms..." From
now on, no-one can escape the necessity of conducting his own
investigation into the racket which pursues him even into his
thoughts, hunts him down even in his dreams. The smallest details
take on a major importance. irritation, fatigue, rudeness, humiliation...
cui bono? Who profits by them? And who profits by the stereotyped
answers that Big Brother Common Sense distributes under the label
of wisdom, like so many alibis? Shall I be content with explanations
that kill me when I have everything to win in a game where all
the cards are stacked against me?

2

The handshake ties and unties the knot of encounters. A gesture
at once curious and trivial which the French quite accurately
say is exchanged: isn't it in fact the most simplified form of
the social contract? What guarantees are they trying to seal,
these hands clasped to the right, to the left, everywhere, with
a liberality that seems to make up for a total lack of conviction?
That agreement reigns, that social harmony exists, that life in
society is perfect? But what still worries us is this need to
convince ourselves, to believe it by force of habit, to reaffirm
it with the strength of our grip.

Eyes know nothing of these pleasantries; they do not recognize
exchange. When our eyes meet someone else's they become uneasy,
as if they could make out their own empty, soulless reflection
in the other person's pupils. Hardly have they met when they slip
aside and try to dodge one another; their lines of flight cross
in an invisible point, making an angle whose acuteness expresses
the divergence, the deeply felt lack of harmony. Sometimes unison
is achieved and eyes connect; the beautiful parallel stare of
royal couples in Egyptian sculpture, the misty, melting gaze,
brimming with eroticism, of lovers: eyes which devour one another
from afar. But most of the time the eyes repudiate the superficial
agreement sealed by the handshake. Consider the popularity of
the energetic reiteration of social agreement (the phrase 'let's
shake on it' indicates its commercial overtones): isn't it a trick
played on the senses, a way of dulling the sensitivity of the
eyes so that they don't revolt against the emptiness of the spectacle?
The good sense of consumer society has brought the old expression
'see things my way' to its logical conclusion: whichever way you
look, you see nothing but things.

Become as senseless and easily handled as a brick!

That is what social organization is kindly inviting everyone to
do. The bourgeoisie has managed to share out irritations more
fairly, allowing a greater number of people to suffer them according
to rational norms (economic, social, political, legal necessities...)
The splinters of constraint produced in this way have in turn
fragmented the cunning and the energy devoted collectively to
evading or smashing them. The revolutionaries of 1793 were great
because they dared to usurp the unitary hold of God over the government
of men; the proletarian revolutionaries drew from what they were
defending a greatness that they could never have seized from the
bourgeois enemy -- their strength derived from themselves alone.

A whole ethic based on exchange value, the pleasures of business,
the dignity of labour, restrained desires, survival, and on their
opposites, pure value, the gratuitous, parasitism, instinctive
brutality and death: this is the filthy tub that human faculties
have been bubbling in for nearly two centuries. From these ingredients
-- refined a little of course -- the cyberneticians are dreaming
of cooking up the man of the future. Are we quite sure that we
haven't yet arrived at the security of perfectly adapted beings,
moving about as uncertainly and unconsciously as insects? For
some time now there have been experiments with subliminal advertising:
the insertion into films of single frames lasting 1/24 of a second,
which are seen by the eye but not registered by consciousness.
The first slogans give more than a glimpse of what is to come:
'Don't drive too fast' and 'Go to church'. But what does a minor
improvement like this represent in comparison with the whole immense
conditioning machine ,each of whose cogs -- town planning, publicity,
ideology, culture -- is capable of dozens of comparable improvements?
Once again, knowledge of the conditions which are going to continue
to be imposed on people if they don't look out is less relevant
than the sensation of living in such degradation now. Zamiatin's
We. Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's 1984
and Touraine's Cinquieme Coup de Trompette push back into
the future a shudder of horror which one look at the present would
produce; and it is the present that develops consciousness and
the will to refuse. Compared with my present imprisonment the
future holds no interest for me.

*

The feeling of humiliation is nothing but the feeling of being
an object. Once it has been understood as such, it becomes the
basis for a combative lucidity for which the critique of the organization
of life cannot be separated from the immediate inception of the
project of living differently. Construction can begin only on
the foundation of individual despair and its supersession; the
efforts made to disguise this despair and pass it off under another
wrapper are enough to prove it.

What is the illusion which stops us seeing the disintegration
of values, the ruin of the world, inauthenticity, non-totality?

Is it that I think that I am happy? Hardly! Such a belief doesn't
stand up to analysis any better than it withstands the blasts
of anguish. On the contrary, it is a belief in the happiness of
others, an inexhaustible source of envy and jealousy which gives
us a vicarious feeling of existence. I envy, therefore I am. To
define oneself by reference to others is to define oneself as
other. And the other is always object. So that life is measured
in degrees of humiliation, the more you 'live': the more you live
the orderly life of things. Here is the cunning of reification,
by which it passes undetected, like arsenic in the jam.

The gentleness of these methods of oppression throws a certain
light on the perversion which prevents me from shouting out "The
emperor has no clothes!" each time the sovereignty of my
everyday life reveals its poverty. Obviously police brutality
is still going strong, to say the least. Everywhere it raises
its head the kindly souls of the left quite rightly condemn it.
But what do they do about it? Do they urge people to arm themselves?
Do they call for legitimate reprisals? Do they encourage pig-hunts
like the one which decorated the trees of Budapest with the finest
fruits of the AVO? No: they organize peaceful demonstrations at
which their trade-union police force treats anyone who questions
their orders as an agent provocateur. The new policemen are ready
to take over. The social psychologists will govern without truncheons:
no more tough cops, only con cops. Oppressive violence is about
to be transformed into a host of reasonably distributed pin-pricks.
The same people who denounce police violence from the heights
of their lofty ideals are urging us on toward a state based on
polite violence. Humanism merely upholsters the machine of Kafka's
"Penal Colony". Less grinding and shouting! Blood upsets
you? Never mind: men will be bloodless. The promised land of survival
will be the realm of peaceful death, and it is this peaceful death
that the humanists are fighting for. No more Guernicas, no more
Auschwitzes, no more Hiroshimas, no more Setifs. Hooray! But what
about the impossibility of living, what about this stifling mediocrity
and this absence of passion? What about the jealous fury in which
the rankling of never being ourselves drives us to imagine that
other people are happy? What about this feeling of never really
being inside your own skin? let nobody say these are minor details
or secondary points. There are no negligible irritations; gangrene
can start in the slightest graze. The crises that shake the world
are not fundamentally different from the conflicts in which my
actions and thoughts confront the hostile forces that entangle
and deflect them. (How could it be otherwise when history, in
the last analysis, is only important to me in so far as it affects
my own life?) Sooner or later the continual division and re-division
of aggravations will split the atom of unlivable reality and liberate
a nuclear energy which nobody suspected behind so much passivity
and gloomy resignation. That which produces the common good is
always terrible.

3

From 1945 to 1960, colonialism was a fairy godmother to the left.
With a new enemy on the scale of Fascism, the left never had to
define itself positively, starting from itself (there was nothing
there); it was ale to affirm itself by negating something else.
In this way it was able to accept itself as a thing, part of an
order of things in which things are everything and nothing.

Nobody dared to announce the end of colonialism for fear that
it would spring up all over the place like a jack-in-the-box whose
lid doesn't shut properly. In fact, from the moment when the collapse
of colonial power revealed the colonialism inherent in all power
over men, the problems of race and colour became about as important
as crossword puzzles. What effect did the clowns of the left have
as they trotted about on their anti-racialist and anti-anti-semitic
hobbyhorses? In the last analysis, that of smothering the cries
of tormented Jews and negroes which were uttered by all those
who were not Jews or negroes, starting with the Jews and negroes
themselves. Of course, I would not dream of questioning the spirit
of generosity which has inspired recent anti-racialism. But I
lose interest in the past as soon as I can no longer affect it.
I am speaking here and now, and nobody can persuade me, in the
name of Alabama or South Africa and their spectacular exploitation,
to forget that the epicentres of such problems lies in me and
in each being who is humiliated and scorned by every aspect of
our own society.

I shall not renounce my share of violence.

Human relationships can hardly be discussed in terms of more or
less tolerable conditions, more or less admissible indignities.
Qualification is irrelevant. Do insults like 'wog' or 'nigger'
hurt more than a word of command? When he is summoned, told off,
or ordered around by a policeman, a boss, an authority, who doesn't
feel deep down, in moments of lucidity, that he is a darkie
and a gook?

The old colonials provided us with a perfect identi-kit portrait
of power when they predicted the descent into bestiality and wretchedness
of those who found their presence undesirable. Law and order come
first, says the guard to the prisoner. Yesterday's anti-colonialists
are trying to humanize the generalized colonialism of power. They
become it's watchdogs in the cleverest way: by barking at all
the after-effects of past inhumanity.

Before he tried to get himself made President of Martinique, Aimé
Césaire made a famous remark: "The bourgeoisie has
found itself unable to solve the major problems which its own
existence has produced: the colonial problem and the problem of
the proletariat." He forgot to add: "For they are one
and the same problem, a problem which anyone who separates them
will fail to understand."

4

I read in Gouy's Histoire de France: "The slightest
insult to the King meant immediate death". In the American
Constitution: "The people are sovereign". In Pouget's
Père Peinard: "Kings get fat off their sovereignty,
while we are starving on ours". Courbon's Secret du Peuple
tells me: "The people today means the mass of men to whom
all respect is denied". Here we have, in a few lines, the
misadventures of the principle of sovereignty.

Kings designated as 'subjects' the objects of their arbitrary
will. No doubt this was an attempt to wrap the radical inhumanity
of its domination in a humanity of idyllic bonds. The respect
due to the king's person cannot in itself be criticized. It is
odious only because it is based on the right to humiliate by subordination.
Contempt rotted the thrones of kings. But what about the citizen's
sovereignty: the rights multiplied by bourgeois vanity and jealousy,
sovereignty distributed like a dividend to each individual? What
about the divine right of kings democratically shared out?

Today, France contains twenty-four million mini-kings, of which
the greatest -- the bosses -- are great only in their ridiculousness.
The sense of respect has become degraded to the point where humiliation
is all that it demands. Democratized into public functions and
roles, the monarchic principle floats with its belly up, like
a dead fish: only its most repulsive aspect is visible. Its will
to be absolutely and unreservedly superior has disappeared. Instead
of basing our lives on our sovereignty, we try to base our sovereignty
on other people's lives. The manners of slaves.

III ISOLATION

Para no sentirme solopor los siglos de los siglos

All we have in common is the illusion
of being together. And beyond the illusion of permitted anodynes
there is only the collective desire to destroy isolation (1).
-- Impersonal relationships are the no-man's land of isolation.
By producing isolation, contemporary social organization signs
its own death-sentence (2).

1

It was as if they were in a cage whose door was wide open without
their being able to escape. Nothing outside the cage had any importance,
because nothing else existed any more. They stayed in the cage,
estranged from everything except the cage, without even a flicker
of desire for anything outside the bars. it would have been abnormal
-- impossible in fact -- to escape into something which had neither
reality nor importance. Absolutely impossible. For inside this
cage, in which they had been born and in which they would die,
the only tolerable framework of experience was the Real, which
was simply an irresistible instinct to act so that things should
have importance. Only if things had some importance could one
breathe, and suffer. it seemed that there was an understanding
between them and the silent dead that it should be so, for the
habit of acting so that things had some importance had become
a human instinct, and one which was apparently eternal. Life was
the important thing, and the Real was part of the instinct which
gave life a little meaning. The instinct didn't try to imagine
what might lie beyond the Real, because there was nothing beyond
it. Nothing important. The door remained open and the cage became
more and more painful in its Reality which was so important for
countless reasons and in countless ways.

We have never emerged from the times of the slavers.

On the public transport which throws them against one another
with statistical indifference, people wear an untenable expression
of disillusion, pride and contempt, like the natural effect of
death on a toothless mouth. The atmosphere of false communication
makes everyone the policeman of his own encounters. The instincts
of flight and aggression trail the knights of wage-labour, who
must now rely on subways and suburban trains for their pitiful
wanderings. If men were transformed into scorpions who sting themselves
and one another, isn't it really because nothing has happened,
and human beings with empty eyes and flabby brains have 'mysteriously'
become mere shadows of men, ghosts of men, and in some ways are
no longer men except in name?

We have nothing in common except the illusion of being together.
Certainly the seeds of an authentic collective life are lying
dormant within the illusion itself -- there is no illusion without
a real basis -- but real community remains to be created. The
power of the lie sometimes manages to erase the bitter reality
of isolation from men's minds. In a crowded street we can occasionally
forget that suffering and separation are still present. And, since
it is only the lie's power which makes us forget, suffering and
separation are reinforced; but in the end the lie itself comes
to grief through relying on this support. For a moment comes when
no illusion can measure up to our distress.

Malaise invades me as the crows around me grows. The compromises
I have made with stupidity under the pressure of circumstances
rush to meet me, swimming towards me in hallucinating waves of
faceless heads. Edvard Munch's famous painting, The Cry,
evokes for me something I feel ten times a day. A man carried
along by a crowd, which only he can see, suddenly screams out
in an attempt to break the spell, to call himself back to himself,
to get back inside his own skin. The tacit acknowledgments, fixed
smiles, lifeless words, listlessness and humiliation sprinkled
in his path suddenly surge into him, driving him out of his desires
and his dreams and exploding the illusion of 'being together'.
People touch without meeting; isolation accumulates but is never
realized; emptiness overcomes us as the density of the crowd grows.
The crowd drags me out of myself and installs thousands of little
sacrifices in my empty presence.

Everywhere neon signs are flashing out the dictum of Plotinus:
All beings are together though each remains separate. But
we only need to hold out our hands and touch one another, to raise
our eyes and meet one another, and everything comes into focus,
as if by magic.

Like crowds, drugs, and love, alcohol can befuddle the most lucid
mind. Alcohol turns the concrete wall of isolation into a paper
screen which the actors can tear according to their fancy, for
it arranges everything on the stage of an intimate theatre. A
generous illusion, and thus still more deadly.

In a gloomy bar where everyone is bored to death, a drunken young
man breaks his glass, then picks up a bottle and smashes it against
the wall. Nobody gets excited; the disappointed young man lets
himself be thrown out. Yet everyone there could have done exactly
the same thing. He alone made the thought concrete, crossing the
first radioactive belt of isolation: interior isolation, the introverted
separation between self and outside world. Nobody responded to
a sign which he thought was explicit. He remained alone like the
hooligan who burns down a church or kills a policeman, at one
with himself but condemned to exile as long as other people remain
exiled from their own existence. He has not escaped from the magnetic
field of isolation; he is suspended in a zone of zero gravity.
All the same, the indifference which greets him allows him to
hear the sound of his own cry; even if this revelation tortures
him, he knows that he will have to start again in another register,
more loudly; with more coherence.

People will be together only in a common wretchedness as long
as each isolated being refuses to understand that a gesture of
liberation, however weak and clumsy it may be, always bears an
authentic communication, an adequate personal message. The repression
which strikes down the libertarian rebel falls on everyone: everyone's
blood flows with the blood of a murdered Durruti. Whenever freedom
retreats one inch, there is a hundred-fold increase in the weight
of the order of things. Excluded from authentic participation,
men's actions stray into the fragile illusion of being together,
or else into its opposite, the abrupt and total rejection of society.
They swing from one to the other like a pendulum turning the hands
on the clock-face of death.

*

Love in its turn swells the illusion of unity. Most of the time
it gets fucked up and miscarries. Its songs are crippled by fear
of always returning to the same single note: whether there are
two of us, or even ten, we will finish up alone as before. What
drives us to despair is not the immensity of our own unsatisfied
desires, but the moment when our newborn passion discovers its
own emptiness. The insatiable desire to fall in love with so many
pretty girls is born in anguish and the fear of loving: we are
so afraid of never escaping from meetings with objects.
The dawn when lovers leave each other's arms is the same dawn
that breaks on the execution of revolutionaries without a revolution.
Isolation a deux cannot confront the effect of general isolation.
Pleasure is broken off prematurely and lovers find themselves
naked in the world, their actions suddenly ridiculous and pointless.
No love is possible in an unhappy world.

The boat of love breaks up in the current of everyday life.

Are you ready to smash the reefs of the old world before they
wreck your desires? Lovers should love their pleasure with more
consequence and more poetry. A story tells how Price Shekour captured
a town and offered it to his favourite for a smile. Some of us
have fallen in love with the pleasure of loving without reserve
-- passionately enough to offer our love to the magnificent bed
of a revolution.

2

To adapt to the world is a game of heads-you-win, tails-I-lose
in which one decides a priori that the negative is positive and
that the impossibility of living is an essential precondition
of life. Alienation never takes such firm root as when it passes
itself off as an inalienable good. Transformed into positivity,
the consciousness of isolation is none other than the private
consciousness, that scrap of individualism which people drag around
like their most sacred birthright, unprofitable but cherished.
It is a sort of pleasure-anxiety which prevents us both from settling
down in the community of illusion and from remaining trapped in
the cellar of isolation.

The no-man's-land of impersonal relationships stretches between
the blissful acceptance of false collectivities and the total
rejection of society. It is the morality of shopkeepers: "You
scratch my back, I'll scratch yours", "You mustn't let
people get too familiar": politeness, the art (for art's
sake) of non-communication.

Let's face it: human relationships being what social hierarchy
has made them, impersonality is the least tiring form of contempt.
It allows us to pass without useless friction through the mill
of daily contacts. it does not prevent us dreaming of superior
forms of civility, such as the courtesy of Lacenaire, on the eve
of his execution, urging a friend: "Above all, please convey
my gratitude to M.Scribe. Tell him that one day, suffering from
the pangs of hunger, I presented myself at his house in order
to worm some money out of him. He complied with my request with
a touching generosity; I am sure he will remember. tell him that
he acted wisely, for I had in my pocket, ready to hand, the means
of depriving France of a dramatist."

But the sterilized zone of impersonal relationships only offers
a truce in the endless battle against isolation, a brief transit
which leads to communication, or more frequently towards the illusion
of community. I would explain in this way my reluctance to stop
a stranger to ask him the way or to 'pass the time of day': to
seek contact in this doubtful fashion. The pleasantness of impersonal
relationships is built on sand; and empty time never did me any
good.

Life is made impossible with such cynical thoroughness that the
balanced pleasure-anxiety of impersonal relationships, functions
as a cog in the general machine for destroying people. In the
end it seems better to start out right away with a radical and
tactically worked-out refusal, rather than to go around knocking
politely on all the doors where one mode of survival is exchanged
for another.

"It would be a drag to die so young". wrote Jacques
Vaché two years before his suicide. if desperation at the
prospect of surviving does not unite with a new grasp of reality
to transform the years to come, only two ways out are left for
the isolated man: the pisspot of parties and pataphysico-religious
sects, or immediate death with Umour. A sixteen-year-old murderer
recently explained: "I did it because I was bored."
Anyone who has felt the drive to self-destruction welling up inside
him knows with what weary negligence he might one day happen to
kill the organizers of his boredom. One day. If he was in the
mood.

After all, if an individual refuses both to adapt to the violence
of the world, and to embrace the violence of the unadapted, what
can he do? If he doesn't raise his will to achieve unity with
the world and with himself to the level of coherent theory and
practice, the vast silence of society's open spaces will raise
around him the palace of solipsist madness.

From the depths of their prisons, those who have been convicted
of 'mental illness' add the screams of their strangled revolt
to the sum of negativity. What a potential Fourier was cleverly
destroyed in this patient described by the psychiatrist Volnat:
"He began to lose all capacity to distinguish between himself
and the external world. Everything that happened in the world
also happened in his body. He could not put a bottle between two
shelves in a cupboard, because the shelves might come together
and break the bottle. And that would hurt inside his head, as
if his head were wedged between the shelves. He could not shut
a suitcase, because pressing the things in the case would press
inside his head. If he walked into the street after closing all
the doors and windows of his house, he felt uncomfortable, because
his brain was compressed by the air, and he had to go back home
to open a door or a window. 'For me to be at ease,' he said, 'I
must have open space. [...] I must have the freedom of my space.
It's the battle with the things all around me.'"

"Outside the consul paused, turning... No se puede vivir
sin amar, were the words on the house." (Lowry, Under
the Volcano).

IV SUFFERING

Suffering caused by natural alienation
has given way to suffering caused by social alienation, while
remedies have become justifications (1). Where there is no justification,
exorcism takes its place (2). But from now on no subterfuge can
hide the existence of an organization based on the distribution
of constraints (3). Consciousness reduced to the consciousness
of constraints is the antechamber of death. The despair of consciousness
makes the murderers of Order; the consciousness of despair makes
the murderers of Disorder (4).

The symphony of spoken and shouted words animates the scenery
of the streets. Over a rumbling basso continuo develop grave and
cheerful themes, hoarse and singsong voices, nostalgic fragments
of sentences. There is a sonorous architecture which overlays
the outline of streets and buildings, reinforcing or counteracting
the attractive or repulsive tone of a district. But from Notting
Hill to Oxford Street the basic chord is the same everywhere:
it's sinister resonance has sunk so deeply into everyone's mind
that it no longer surprises them. "That's life", "These
things are sent to try us", "You have to take the rough
with the smooth", "That's the way it goes"... this
lament whose weft unites the most diverse conversations has so
perverted our sensibility that it passes for the commonest of
human dispositions. Where it is not accepted, despair disappears
from sight. Nobody seems worried that joy has been absent
from European music for nearly two centuries; which says everything.
Consume, consume: the ashes have consumed the fire.

How have suffering and it's rites of exorcism usurped this importance?
Undoubtedly because of the struggle to survive imposed on the
first men by a hostile nature, full of cruel and mysterious forces.
In the face of danger, the weakness of men discovered in social
agglomeration not only protection but a way of co-operating with
nature, making a truce with her and even transforming her. In
the struggle against natural alienation -- death, sickness, suffering
-- alienation became social. We escaped the rigours of exposure,
hunger and discomfort only to fall into the trap of slavery. We
were enslaved by gods, by men, by language. And such a slavery
had its positive side: there was a certain greatness of living
in terror of a god who also made you invincible. This mixture
of human and inhuman would, it is true, be a sufficient explanation
of the ambiguity of suffering, its way of appearing right through
history at once as shameful sickness and salutary evil -- as a
good thing, after a fashion. But this would be to overlook the
ignoble slag of religion, above all Christian mythology, which
devoted all its genius to perfecting this morbid and depraved
precept: protect yourself against mutilation by mutilating yourself!

"Since Christ's coming, we are delivered not from the evil
of suffering but from the evil of suffering uselessly", writes
the Jesuit father Charles. How right he is: power's problem has
always been, not to abolish itself, but to give itself reasons
so as not to oppress 'uselessly'. Christianity, that unhealthy
therapeutic, pulled off its masterstroke when it married man to
suffering, whether on the basis of divine grace or natural law.
From prince to manager, from priest to expert, from father confessor
to social worker, it is always the principle of useful suffering
and willing sacrifice which forms the most solid base for hierarchical
power. Whatever reasons it invokes -- a better world, the next
world, building communism or fighting communism -- suffering accepted
is always Christian, always. Today the clerical vermin
have given way to the missionaries of a Christ dyed red. Everywhere
official pronouncements bear in their watermark the disgusting
image of the crucified man, everywhere comrades are urged to sport
the stupid halo of the militant martyr. And with their blood,
the kitchen-hands of the good Cause are mixing up the sausage-meat
of the future: less cannon-fodder, more doctrine-fodder!

*

To begin with, bourgeois ideology seemed determined to root out
suffering with as much persistence as it devoted to the pursuit
of the religions that it hated. Infatuated with progress, comfort,
profit, well-being, it had enough weapons -- if not real weapons,
at least imaginary ones -- to convince everyone of its will to
put a scientific end to the evil of suffering and the evil of
faith. As we know, all it did was to invent new anaesthetics and
new superstitions.

Without God, suffering became 'natural', inherent in 'human nature';
it would be overcome, but only after more suffering: the martyrs
of science, the victims of progress, the lost generations. But
in this very movement the idea of natural suffering betrayed its
social root. When Human Nature was removed, suffering became social,
inherent in social existence. But of course, revolutions demonstrated
that the social evil of pain was not a metaphysical principle:
that a form of society could exist from which the pain of living
would be excluded. History shattered the social ontology of suffering,
but suffering, far from disappearing, found new reasons for existence
in the exigencies of History, which had suddenly become
trapped, in its turn, in a one-way street. China prepares children
for the classless society by teaching them love of their country,
love of their family, and love of work. Thus historical ontology
picks up the remains of all the metaphysical systems of the past:
an sich, God, Nature, Man, Society. From now on, men will have
to make history by fighting History itself, because History has
become the last ontological earthwork of power, the last con by
which it hides, behind the promise of a long weekend, its will
to endure until Saturday which will never come. Beyond fetishised
history, suffering is revealed as stemming from hierarchical social
organization. And when the will to put an end to hierarchical
power has sufficiently tickled the consciousness of men, everyone
will admit that freedom in arms and weight of constraints have
nothing metaphysical about them.

2

While it was placing happiness and freedom on the order of the
day, technological civilization was inventing the ideology of
happiness and freedom. Thus it condemned itself to creating no
more than the freedom of apathy, happiness in passivity. But at
least this invention, perverted though it was, had denied that
suffering is inherent in the human condition, that such an inhuman
condition could last forever. That is why bourgeois thought fails
when it tries to provide consolation for suffering; none of its
justifications are as powerful as the hope which was born from
its initial bet on technology and well-being.

Desperate fraternity in sickness is the worst thing that can happen
to civilization. In the twentieth century, death terrifies men
less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized,
specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand
times a day, until the exhaustion of mind and body, until that
death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with
absence; this is what lends a dangerous charm to dreams of apocalypses,
gigantic destructions, complete annihilations, cruel, clean and
total deaths. Auschwitz and Hiroshima are indeed the 'comfort
of nihilism'. Let impotence in the face of suffering become a
collective sentiment, and the demand for suffering and death can
sweep a whole community. Consciously or not, most people would
rather die than live a permanently unsatisfying life. Look at
anti-bomb marchers: most of them were nothing but penitents trying
to exorcise their desire to disappear with all the rest of humanity.
They would deny it, of course, but their miserable faces gave
them away. The only real joy is revolutionary.

Perhaps it is in order to ensure that a universal desire to perish
does not take hold of men that a whole spectacle is organized
around particular sufferings. A sort of nationalized philanthropy
impels man to find consolation for his own infirmities in the
spectacle of other people's.

Consider disaster photographs, stories of cuckolded singers, the
ridiculous dramas of the gutter press; hospitals, asylums, and
prisons: real museums of suffering for the use of those whose
fear of entering them makes them happy to be outside. I sometimes
feel such a diffuse suffering dispersed through me that I find
relief in the chance misfortune that concretizes and justifies
it, offers it a legitimate outlet. Nothing will dissuade me of
this: the sadness I feel after a separation, a failure, a bereavement
doesn't reach me from outside like an arrow but wells up from
inside me like a spring freed by a landslide. There are wounds
which allow the spirit to utter a long-stifled cry. Despair never
lets go its prey; it is only the prey which isolates despair in
the end of a love or the death of a child, where there is only
its shadow. Mourning is a pretext, a convenient way of spitting
out nothingness in small drops. The tears, the cries and howls
of childhood remain imprisoned in the hearts of men. For ever?
In you also the emptiness is growing.

3

Another word about the alibis of power. Suppose that a tyrant
took pleasure in throwing prisoners who had been flayed alive
into a small cell; suppose that to hear their screams and see
them scramble each time they brushed against one another amused
him a lot, at the same time causing him to meditate on human nature
and the curious behaviour of men. Suppose that at the same time
and in the same country there were philosophers and wise men who
explained to the worlds of science and art that suffering had
to do with the collective life of men, the inevitable presence
of Others, society as such -- wouldn't we be right to consider
these men the tyrant's watchdogs? By proclaiming such theses as
these, a certain existentialist conception has demonstrated not
only the collusion of left intellectuals with power, but also
the crude trick by which an inhuman social organization attributes
the responsibility for its cruelties to its victims themselves.
A nineteenth century critic remarked: "Throughout contemporary
literature we find the tendency to regard individual suffering
as a social evil and to make the organization of society responsible
for the misery and degradation of its members. This is a profoundly
new idea: suffering is no longer treated as a matter of fatality."
Certain thinkers steeped in fatalism have not been troubled overmuch
by such novelties: consider Sartre's hell-is-other-people, Freud's
death instinct, Mao's historical necessity. After all, what distinguishes
these doctrines from the stupid "it's just human nature"?

Hierarchical social organization is like a system of hoppers lined
with sharp blades. While it flays us alive power cleverly persuades
us that we are flaying each other. It is true that to limit myself
to writing this is to risk fostering a new fatalism; but I certainly
intend in writing it that nobody should limit himself to reading
it.

*

Altruism is the other side of the coin of 'hell-is-other-people';
only this time mystification appears under a positive sign. Let's
put an end to this old soldier crap once and for all! For others
to interest me I must first find in myself the energy for such
an interest. What binds me to others must grow out of what binds
me to the most exuberant and demanding part of my will to live;
not the other way round. It is always myself that I am looking
for in other people; my enrichment, my realization. let everyone
understand this and 'each for himself' taken to its ultimate conclusion
will be transformed into 'all for each'. The freedom of one will
be the freedom of all. A community which is not built on the demands
of individuals and their dialectic can only reinforce the oppressive
violence of power. The Other in whom I do not find myself is nothing
but a thing, and altruism leads me to the love of things, to the
love of my isolation.

Seen from the viewpoint of altruism, or of solidarity, that altruism
of the left, the sentiment of equality is standing on its head.
What is it but the common anguish of associates who are lonely
together, humiliated, fucked up, beaten, deprived, contented together,
the anguish of unattached particles, hoping to be joined together,
not in reality, but in a mystical union, any union, that of the
Nation or that of the Labour Movement, it doesn't matter which
so long as it makes you feel like those drunken evenings when
we're all pals together? Equality in the great family of man reeks
of the incense of religious mystification. You need a blocked-up
nose to miss the stink.

For myself, I recognize no equality except that which my will
to live according to my desires recognizes in the will to live
of others. Revolutionary equality will be indivisibly individual
and collective.

4

The perspective of power has only one horizon: death. And life
goes to this well of despair so often that in the end it falls
in and drowns. Wherever the fresh water of life stagnates, the
features of the drowned man reflect the faces of the living: the
positive, looked at closely, turns out to be negative, the young
are already old and everything we are building is already a ruin.
In the realm of despair, lucidity blinds just as much as falsehood.
We die of not knowing, struck from behind. In addition, the knowledge
of the death that awaits us only increases the torture and brings
on the agony. The disease of attrition that checks, shackles,
forbids our actions, eats us away more surely than a cancer, but
nothing spreads the disease like the acute consciousness of this
attrition. I remain convinced that nothing could save a man who
was continually asked: have you noticed the hand that, with all
die respect, is killing you? To evaluate the effect of each tiny
persecution, to estimate neurologically the weight of each constraint,
would be enough to flood the strongest individual with a single
feeling, the feeling of total and terrible powerlessness. The
maggots of constraint are spawned in the very depths of the mind;
nothing human can resist them.

Sometimes I feel as if power is making me like itself: a great
energy on the point of collapsing, a rage powerless to break out,
a desire for wholeness suddenly petrified. An impotent order survives
only by ensuring the impotence of its slaves: Franco and Batista
demonstrated this fact with brio when they castrated captured
revolutionaries. The regimes jokingly known as 'democratic' merely
humanize castration. At first sight, to bring an old age prematurely
seems less feudal than the use of the knife and ligature. But
only at first sight: for as soon as a lucid mind has understood
that impotence now strikes through the mind itself, we might as
well pack up and go home.

There is a kind of understanding which is allowed by power because
it serves its purposes. To borrow one's lucidity from the light
of power is to illuminate the darkness of despair, to feed truth
on lies. Thus the aesthetic stage is defined: either death against
power, or death in power: Arthur Cravan and Jacques Vaché
on one side, the S.S, the mercenary and the hired killer on the
other. For them death is a logical and natural end, the final
confirmation of a permanent state of affairs, the last dot of
a lifeline on which, in the end, nothing was written. Everyone
who does not resist the almost universal attraction of power meets
the same fate: the stupid and confused always, very often the
intelligent too. The same rift is to be found in Drieu and Jacques
Rigaux, but they came down on different sides: the impotence of
the first was moulded in submission and servility, the revolt
of the second smashed itself prematurely against the impossible.
The despair of consciousness makes the murderers of Order, the
consciousness of despair makes the murderers of Disorder. The
fall back into conformity of the so-called anarchists of the right
is caused by the same gravitational pull as the fall of damned
archangels into the iron jaws of suffering. The rattles of counter-revolution
echo through the vaults of despair.

Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight,
no matter how small, will hold it at bay. To work on the side
of delight and authentic festivity can hardly be distinguished
from preparing for a general insurrection.

In our times, people are invited to take part in a gigantic hunt
with myths and received ideas as quarry, but for safety's sake
they are sent without weapons, or, worse, with paper weapons of
pure speculation, into the swamp of constraints where they finally
stick. Perhaps we will get our first taste of delight by pushing
the ideologists of demystification in front of us, so that we
can see how they make out, and either take advantage of their
exploits or advance over their bodies.

As Rosanov says, men are crushed under the wardrobe. Without lifting
up the wardrobe it is impossible to deliver whole peoples from
their endless and unbearable suffering. It is terrible that even
one man should be crushed under such a weight: to want to breathe,
and not to be able to. The wardrobe rests on everybody, and everyone
gets his inalienable share of suffering. And everybody tries to
lift up the wardrobe, but not with the same conviction, not with
the same energy. A curious groaning civilization.

Thinkers ask themselves: "What? Men under the wardrobe? However
did they get there?" All the same, they got there. And if
someone comes along and proves in the name of objectivity that
the burden can never be removed, each of his words adds to the
weight of the wardrobe, that object which he means to describe
with the universality of his 'objective consciousness'. And the
whole Christian spirit is there, fondling suffering like a good
dog and handing out photographs of crushed but smiling men. "The
rationality of the wardrobe is always the best", proclaim
the thousands of books published every day to be stacked in the
wardrobe. And all the while everyone wants to breathe and no-one
can breathe, and many say "We will breathe later", and
most do not die, because they are already dead.

It is now or never.

V THE DECLINE AND FALL OF WORK

The duty to produce alienates the passion for creation. Productive
labour is part and parcel of the technology of law and order.
The working day grows shorter as the empire of conditioning extends.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity,
the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire
to create. What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can
remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning,
jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery,
bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun
dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the
day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals
of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise
of weekends, where the crowd communes in weariness and boredom?
From adolescence to retirement each 24-hour cycle repeats the
same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical
repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom,
exhaustion. From the butchering of youth's energy to the gaping
wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under the blows
of forced labour. Never before has a civilization reached such
a degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation,
drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live. The same people
who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work
are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding
the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already
the front against forced labour is being formed; its gestures
of refusal are moulding the consciousness of the future. Every
call for productivity in the conditions chosen by capitalist and
Soviet economy is a call to slavery.

The necessity of production is so easily proved that any hack
philosopher of industrialism can fill ten books with it. Unfortunately
for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth
century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the
right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed
at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above
all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically.
The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival;
from now on, people want to live, not just to survive.

The tripalium is an instrument of torture. Labour
means 'suffering'. We are unwise to forget the origin of the words
'travail' and 'labour'. At least the nobility never forgot their
own dignity and the indignity which marked their bondsmen. The
aristocratic contempt for work reflected the master's contempt
for the dominated classes; work was the expiation to which they
were condemned to all eternity by the divine decree which had
willed them, for impenetrable reasons, to be inferior. Work took
its place among the sanctions of Providence as the punishment
for poverty, and because it was the means to a future salvation
such a punishment could take on the attributes of pleasure. Basically,
work was less important than submission.

The bourgeoisie does not dominate, it exploits. It does not need
to be master, it prefers to use. Why has nobody seen that
the principle of productivity simply replaced the principle of
feudal authority? Why has nobody wanted to understand?

Is it because work ameliorates the human condition and saves the
poor, at least in illusion, from eternal damnation? Undoubtedly,
but today it seems that the carrot of happier tomorrows has smoothly
replaced the carrot of salvation in the next world. In both cases
the present is always under the heel of oppression.

Is it because it transforms nature? Yes, but what can I do with
a nature ordered in terms of profit and loss, in a world where
the inflation of techniques conceals the deflation of the use-value
of life? Besides, just as the sexual act is not intended to procreate,
but makes children by accident, organized labour transforms the
surface of continents as a by-product, not a purpose. Work to
transform the world? Tell me another. The world is being transformed
in the direction prescribed by the existence of forced labour;
which is why it is being transformed so badly.

Perhaps man realizes himself in his forced labour? In the nineteenth
century the concept of work retained a vestige of the notion of
creativity. Zola describes a nailsmiths' contest in which the
workers competed in the perfection of their tiny masterpiece.
Love of the trade and the vitality of an already smothered creativity
incontestably helped man to bear ten or fifteen hours which nobody
could have stood if some kind of pleasure had not slipped into
it. The survival of the craft conception allowed each worker to
contrive a precarious comfort in the hell of the factory. But
Taylorism dealt the death-blow to a mentality which had been carefully
fostered by archaic capitalism. It is useless to expect even a
caricature of creativity from the conveyor-belt. Nowadays ambition
and the love of the job well done are the indelible mark of defeat
and the most mindless submission. Which is why, wherever submission
is demanded, the old ideological fart wends its way, from the
Arbeit Macht Frei of the concentration camps to the homilies
of Henry Ford and Mao Tse-tung.

So what is the function of forced labour? The myth of power exercised
jointly by the master and God drew its coercive force from the
unity of the feudal system. Destroying the unitary myth, the power
of the bourgeoisie inaugurated, under the flag of crisis, the
reign of ideologies, which can never attain, separately or together,
a fraction of the efficacy of myth. The dictatorship of productive
work stepped into the breech. It's mission is physically to weaken
the majority of men, collectively to castrate and stupefy them
in order to make them receptive to the least pregnant, least virile,
most senile ideologies in the entire history of falsehood.

Most of the proletariat at the beginning of the nineteenth century
had been physically enervated, systematically broken by the torture
of the workshop. Revolts came from artisans, from privileged or
unemployed groups, not from workers shattered by fifteen hours
of labour. Isn't it disturbing that the reduction of working time
came just when the spectacular ideological miscellany produced
by consumer society was beginning effectively to replace the feudal
myths destroyed by the young bourgeoisie? (People really have
worked for a refrigerator, a car, a television set. Many still
do, 'invited' as they are to consume the passivity and empty time
that the 'necessity' of production 'offers' them.)

Statistics published in 1938 indicated that the use of the most
modern technology then available would reduce necessary working
time to three hours a day. Not only are we a long way off with
our seven hours, but after wearing out generations of workers
by promising them the happiness which is sold today on the installment
plan, the bourgeoisie (and its Soviet equivalent) pursue man's
destruction outside the workshop. Tomorrow they will deck out
their five hours of necessary wear and tear with a time of 'creativity'
which will grow just as fast as they can fill it with the impossibility
of creating anything (the famous 'leisure explosion').

It has been quite correctly written: "China faces gigantic
economic problems; for her, productivity is a matter of life and
death." Nobody would dream of denying it. What seems important
to me is not the economic imperatives, but the manner of responding
to them. The Red Army in 1917 was a new kind of organization.
The Red Army in 1960 is an army such as is found in capitalist
countries. Circumstances have shown that its effectiveness has
been far below the potential of a revolutionary militia. In the
same way, the planned Chinese economy, by refusing to allow federated
groups to organize their work autonomously, condemns itself to
become another example of the perfected form of capitalism called
socialism. Has anyone bothered to study the modes of work of primitive
peoples, the importance of play and creativity, the incredible
yield obtained by methods which the application of modern technology
would make a hundred times more efficient? Obviously not. Every
appeal for productivity comes from above. But only creativity
is spontaneously rich. It is not from 'productivity' that a full
life is to be expected, it is not 'productivity' that will produce
an enthusiastic collective response to economic needs. But what
can we say when we know how the cult of work is honoured from
Cuba to China, and how well the virtuous pages of Guizot would
sound in a May Day speech?

To the extent that automation and cybernetics foreshadow the massive
replacement of workers by mechanical slaves, forced labour is
revealed as belonging purely to the barbaric practices needed
to maintain order. Thus power manufactures the dose of fatigue
necessary for the passive assimilation of its televised diktats.
What carrot is worth working for, after this? The game is up;
there is nothing to lose anymore, not even an illusion. The organization
of work and the organization of leisure are the blades of the
castrating shears whose job is to improve the race of fawning
dogs. One day, will we see strikers, demanding automation and
a ten-hour week, choosing, instead of picketing, to make love
in the factories, the offices and the culture centres? Only the
planners, the managers, the union bosses and the sociologists
would be surprised and worried. Not without reason; after all,
their skin is at stake.

VI DECOMPRESSION AND THE THIRD FORCE

Until now, tyranny has merely changed hands. In their common
respect for rulers, antagonistic powers have always fostered the
seeds of their future coexistence. (When the leader of the game
takes the power of a Leader, the revolution dies with the revolutionaries.)
Unresolved antagonisms fester, hiding real contradictions. Decompression
is the permanent control of both antagonists by the ruling class.
The third force radicalizes contradictions and leads to their
supersession, in the name of individual freedom and against all
forms of constraint. Power has no option but to smash or incorporate
the third force without admitting its existence.

To sum up. Millions of men lived in a huge building with no doors
or windows. The feeble light of countless oil lamps competed with
the unchanging darkness. As had been the custom since remotest
antiquity, the upkeep of the lamps was the duty of the poor, so
that the flow of oil followed the alternation of revolt and pacification.
One day a general insurrection broke out, the most violent that
this people had ever known. Its leaders demanded a fair allotment
of the costs of lighting; a large number of revolutionaries said
that what they considered a public utility should be free; a few
extremists went so far as to clamour for the destruction of the
building, which they claimed was unhealthy, even unfit for human
habitation. As usual, the more reasonable combatants found themselves
helpless before the violence of the conflict. During a particularly
lively clash with the forces of order, a stray bullet pierced
the outer wall, leaving a crack through which daylight streamed
in. After a moment of stupor, this flood of light was greeted
with cries of victory. The solution had been found: all they had
to do was to make some more holes. The lamps were thrown away
or put in museums, and power fell to the window makers. The partisans
of radical destruction were forgotten, and even their discreet
liquidation, it seems, went almost unnoticed. (Everyone was arguing
about the number and position of the windows.) Then, a century
or two later, their names were remembered, when the people, that
eternal malcontent, had grown accustomed to plate-glass windows,
and took to asking extravagant questions. To drag out our days
in a greenhouse, is that living?" they asked.

*

The consciousness of our time oscillates between that of the walled-up
man and that of the prisoner. For the individual, the oscillation
takes the place of freedom; like a condemned man, he paces up
and down between the blank wall of his cell and the barred window
that represents the possibility of escape. If somebody knocks
a hole in the cellar of isolation, hope filters in with the light.
The good behaviour of the prisoner depends on the hope of escape
which prisons foster. On the other hand, when he is trapped by
a wall with no windows, a man can only feel the desperate rage
to knock it down or break his head against it, which can only
be seen as unfortunate from the point of view of efficient social
organization (even if the suicide doesn't have the happy idea
of going to his death in the style of an oriental price, immolating
all his slaves: judges, bishops, generals, policemen, psychiatrists,
philosophers, managers, specialists, planners...)

The man who is walled up alive has nothing to lose; the prisoner
still has hope. Hope is the leash of submission. When power's
boiler is in danger of exploding, it uses its safety-valve to
lower the pressure. It seems to change; in fact it only adapts
itself and resolves its difficulties.

There is no authority which does not see, rising against it, an
authority which is similar but which passes for its opposite.
But nothing is more dangerous for the principle of hierarchical
government than the merciless confrontation of two powers driven
by a rage for total annihilation. In such a conflict, the tidal
wave of fanaticism carries away the most stable values; no-mans-land
eats up the whole map, establishing everywhere the inter-regnum
of nothing is true. everything is permitted". History, however,
offers not one example of a titanic conflict which has not opportunely
defused and turned into a comic-opera battle. What is the source
of this decompression? The agreement on matters of principle which
is implicitly reached by the warring powers.

The hierarchical principle remains common to the fanatics of both
sides: opposite the capitalism of Lloyd George and Krupp appears
the anticapitalism of Lenin and Trotsky. From the mirrors of the
masters of the present the masters of the future are already smiling
back. Heinrich Heine writes:

The tyrant dies smiling; for he knows that after his death tyranny
will merely change hands, and slavery will never end. Bosses differ
according to their modes of domination, but they are still bosses,
owners of a power exercised as a private right. (Lenin's greatness
has to do with his romantic refusal to assume the position of
absolute master implied by his ultra-hierarchical organization
of the Bolshevik party; and it is to this greatness also that
the workers' movement is indebted for Kronstadt, Budapest and
batiuchka Stalin.)

From this moment, the point of contact between the two powers
becomes the point of decompression. To identify the enemy with
Evil and crown one's own side with the halo of Good has the strategic
advantage of ensuring unity of action by canalising the energy
of the combatants. But this manoeuvre demands the annihilation
of the enemy. Moderates hesitate before such a prospect; for the
radical destruction of the enemy would include the destruction
of what their own side has in common with the enemy. The logic
of Bolshevism demanded the heads of the leaders of social-democracy;
the latter hastily sold out, and they did so precisely because
they were leaders. The logic of anarchism demanded the liquidation
of Bolshevik power; the latter rapidly crushed them, and did so
inasmuch as it was hierarchical power. The same predictable sequence
of betrayals threw Durrutti's anarchists before the united guns
of republicans, socialists and Stalinists.

As soon as the leader of the game turns into a Leader. the principle
of hierarchy is saved, and the Revolution sits down to preside
over the execution of the revolutionaries. We must never forget
that the revolutionary project belongs to the masses alone; leaders
help it, Leaders betray it. To begin with, the real struggle takes
place between the leader of the game and the Leader.

The professional revolutionary measures the state of his forces
in quantitative terms, just as any soldier judges an officer's
rank by the number of men under his command. The leaders of so-called
insurrectionary parties dismiss the qualitative in favour of a
quantitative expertise. had the 'reds' been blessed with half
a million more men with modern weapons, the Spanish revolution
would still have been lost. It died under the heels of the people's
commissars. The speeches of La Pasionaria already sounded like
funeral orations; pathetic whining drowned the language of deeds,
the spirit of the collectives of Aragon -- the spirit of a radical
minority resolved to sever with a single stroke all the heads
of the hydra, not just its fascist head.

Never, and for good reason, has an absolute confrontation been
carried through. So far the last fight has only had false starts.
Everything must be resumed from scratch. History's only justification
is to help us do it.

Under the process of decompression, antagonists who seemed irreconcilable
at first sight grow old together, become frozen in purely formal
opposition, lose their substance, neutralize and moulder into
each other. Who would recognize the Bolshevik with his knife between
his teeth in the Gagarinism of doting Moscow? Today, by the grace
of the Ïcumenical miracle, the slogan Workers of the World,
unite" celebrates the union of the world's bosses. A touching
scene. The common element in the antagonism, the seed of power,
which a radical struggle would have rooted out, has grown up to
reconcile the estranged brothers.

Is it as simple as this? Of course not; the farce would lose its
entertainment value. On the international stage, those two old
hams, capitalism and anticapitalism, carry on their lovers' banter.
How the spectators tremble when they begin to quarrel, how they
stamp with glee when peace blesses the loving couple! Is interest
flagging? A brick is added to the Berlin wall; the bloodthirsty
Mao gnashes his paper teeth, while in the background a choir of
little Chinese nitwits sings paeons to fatherland, family and
work. Patched up like this, the old melodrama is ready to hit
the road. The ideological spectacle keeps up with the times by
bringing out harmless plastic antagonisms; are you for or against
Brigitte Bardot, the Beatles, mini-cars, hippies, nationalization,
spaghetti, old people, the TUC, mini-skirts, pop art, thermonuclear
war, hitch-hiking? There is no one who is not accosted at every
moment of the day by posters, news flashes, stereotypes, summoned
to take sides over each of the prefabricated trifles that conscientiously
stop up all the sources of everyday creativity. In the hands of
power these particles of antagonism are moulded into a magnetic
ring whose function is to make everybody lose their bearings,
to pull everyone out of himself and to scramble lines of force.

Decompression is simply the control of antagonisms by power. The
opposition of two terms is given its real meaning by the introduction
of a third. As long as there are only two equal and opposite polarities,
they neutralize each other, since each is defined by the other;
as it is impossible to choose between them, we are led into the
domain of tolerance and relativity which is so dear to the bourgeoisie.
One can well understand the importance for the apostolic hierarchy
of the dispute between Manicheism and Trinitarianism! In a merciless
confrontation between God and Satan, what would have been left
of ecclesiastical authority? Nothing, as the millenarian crises
demonstrated. That is why the secular arm carried out its holy
offices, and the pyres crackled for the mystics of God or the
devil, those overbold theologians who questioned the principle
of Three in One. The temporal masters of Christianity were resolved
that only they should be entitled to treat of the difference between
the master of Good and the master of Evil. They were the great
intermediaries through which the choice of one side or the other
had to pass; they controlled the paths to salvation and damnation,
and this control was more important to them than salvation and
damnation themselves. On earth they proclaimed themselves judges
without appeal, since they had also decided to be the judged in
an afterlife whose laws they had invented.

The Christian myth defused the bitter Manichean conflict by offering
to the believer the possibility of individual salvation; this
was the breach opened up by the Poor Bugger of Nazareth. Thus
man escaped the rigours of a confrontation which necessarily led
to the destruction of values, to nihilism. But the same stroke
denied him the opportunity to reconquer himself by means of a
general upheaval, the chance of taking his place in the universe
by chasing out the gods and their slavemasters. Therefore, the
movement of decompression appears to have the function of shackling
man's most irreducible desire, the desire to be completely himself.

In all conflicts between opposing sides, an irrepressible upsurge
of individual desires takes place and often reaches a threatening
intensity. To this extent we are justified in talking of a third
force. From the individual's point of view, the third force
is what the force of decompression is from the point of view of
power. The small chance of every struggle, it radicalizes insurrections,
denounces false problems, threatens power in its very structure.
It is what Brecht was referring to in one of his Keuner stories:
When a proletarian was brought to court and asked if he wished
to take the oath in the ecclesiastical or the lay form, he replied
'I'm out of work.'" The third force does not hope for the
withering away of constraints, but aims to supersede them. Prematurely
crushed or incorporated, it becomes by inversion a force of decompression.
Thus, the salvation of the soul is nothing but the will to live,
incorporated through myth, mediated, emptied of its real content.
On the other hand, their peremptory demand for a full life explains
the hatred incurred by certain gnostic sects or by the Brethren
of the Free Spirit. During the decline of Christianity, the struggle
between Pascal and the Jesuits spotlighted the opposition between
the reformist doctrine of individual salvation and compromise
with heaven and the project of realizing God by the nihilist destruction
of the world. And, once it had got rid of the dead wood of theology,
the third force survived to inspire Babeuf's struggle against
the million doré, the Marxist project of the complete
man, the dreams of Fourier, the explosion of the Commune, and
the violence of the anarchists.

*

Individualism, alcoholism, collectivism, activism... the variety
of ideologies shows that there are a hundred ways of being on
the side of power. There is only one way to be radical. The wall
that must be knocked down is immense, but it has been cracked
so many times that soon a single cry will be enough to bring it
crashing to the ground. Let the formidable reality of the third
force emerge at last from the mists of history, with all the individual
passions that have fuelled the insurrections of the past! Soon
we shall find that an energy is locked up in everyday life which
can move mountains and abolish distances. The long revolution
is preparing to write works in the ink of action whose unknown
or nameless authors will flock to join Sade, Fourier, Babeuf,
Marx, Lacenaire, Stirner, Lautréamont, Léhautier,
Vaillant, Henry, Villa, Zapata, Makhno, the Communards, the insurrectionaries
of Hamburg, Kiel, Kronstadt, Asturias -- all those who have not
yet played their last card in a game which we have only just joined:
the great gamble whose stake is freedom.

COMMUNICATION MADE IMPOSSIBLE:
POWER AS UNIVERSAL MEDIATION

In the order of power, mediation consists of false needs in
which the illusion of legal reform appears as the sole general
will arising from mediations. These false needs have grown to
a greater and greater extent, but are today threatened by the
dictatorship of the consumable (VII), the primacy of exchange
over gift (VIII), the cybernetic techniques (IX) and the reign
of quantity (X).

VII THE AGE OF HAPPINESS

The contemporary welfare state belatedly provides the guarantees
of survival which were demanded by the disinherited members of
the production society of former days (1). Richness of survival
entails the pauperisation of life (2). Purchasing power is licence
to purchase power, to become an object in the order of things.
The tendency is for both oppressor and oppressed to fall, albeit
at different speeds, under one and the same dictatorship: the
dictatorship of consumer goods (3).

1

The face of happiness vanished from art and literature as it began
to be reproduced along endless walls and hoardings, offering to
each particular passerby the universal image in which he is invited
to recognize himself.

Three cheers for Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham: happiness is not
a myth! The more we produce, the better we shall live," writes
the humanist Fourastié, and another genius, general Eisenhower,
takes up the refrain: to save the economy, we must buy, buy anything."
Production and consumption are the dugs of modern society. Thus
suckled, humanity grows in strength and beauty: rising standards
of living, all mod. cons, a choice of entertainments, culture
for all, the comfort of your dreams. On the horizon of the Khrushchev
report, the rosy dawn of Communism is breaking at last, a new
era heralded by two revolutionary decrees: the abolition of taxes
and free transport for all. Yes, the golden age is in sight; or
rather within spitting distance.

In this upheaval one thing has disappeared: the proletariat. Where
on earth can it be? Spirited away? Gone underground? Or has it
been put in a museum? Sociologi disputant. We hear from some quarters
that in the advanced industrial countries the proletariat no longer
exists, what with all these stereograms, TV sets, slumberland
mattresses, mini-cars, tower blocks and bingo halls. Others denounce
this as a sleight of hand and indignantly point out a few remaining
workers whose low wages and wretched conditions do undeniably
evoke the 19th century. Backward sectors", comes the retort,
in the process of reabsorption". Can you deny that the direction
of economic development is towards Sweden, Czechoslovakia, the
welfare state, and not towards India?

The black curtain rises: the hunt is on for the starving, for
the last of the proletarians. The prize goes to the one who sells
him his car and his mixer, his bar and his home library; the one
who teaches him to see himself in the leering hero of an advertisement
that reassures him: You smile when you smoke Cadets."

And happy, happy humanity so soon to receive the parcels which
were redirected to them at such great cost by the rebels of the
nineteenth century. The insurgents of Lyon and Fourmies have certainly
proved luckier dead than alive. The millions of human beings who
were shot, tortured, jailed, starved, treated like animals and
made the objects of a conspiracy of ridicule can sleep in peace
in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they
died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned
rooms, to believe on the strength of their daily dose of television
that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting
to the last, so that you too could own a Philips hi-fi stereo
system. A fine future, and one to realize all the dreams of the
past, there is no doubt about it.

Only the present is left out of the reckoning. Ungrateful and
uncouth, the younger generation doesn't want to know about this
glorious past which is offered as a free gift to every consumer
of Trotskyist-reformist ideology. They claim that to make demands
means to make demands for the here and now. They recall that the
meaning of past struggles is rooted in the present of the men
who fought them, and that despite different historical conditions
they themselves are living in the same present. In short, one
might say that radical revolutionary currents are inspired by
one unchanging project: the project of being a whole man, a
will to live totally which Marx was the first to provide with
scientific tactics. But these are pernicious theories which the
holy churches of Christ and Stalin never miss a chance to condemn.
More money, more fridges, more holy sacraments and more GNP, that's
what is needed to satisfy our revolutionary appetites.

Are we condemned to the state of well-being? peace-loving citizens
will inevitably deplore the forms taken by the opposition to a
programme which everybody agrees with, from Khrushchev to Schweitzer,
from the Pope to Fidel Castro, from Aragon to the late Mr.Kennedy.

In December 1956, a thousand young people ran wild in the streets
of Stockholm, setting fire to cars, smashing neon signs, tearing
down hoardings and looting department stores. At Merlebach, during
a strike called to force the mine-owners to bring up the bodies
of seven miners killed by a cave-in, the workers set about the
cars parked at the pit head. In January 1961, strikers in Liege
burned down the Guillemins station and destroyed the offices of
the newspaper La Meuse. Seaside resorts in England and Belgium
were devastated by the combined efforts of hundreds of mods and
rockers in March 1964. In Amsterdam (1966) the workers held the
streets for several days. Not a month goes by without a wildcat
strike which pits the workers against both employers and union
bosses. Welfare State? The people of Watts have given their answer.

A Ford worker summed up his difference of opinion with the B.F.Skinners,
Doxiadis', Lord Robenses, Norbert Weiners and other watchdogs
of the future in the following terms: Since 1936 I have been fighting
for higher wages. My father before me fought for higher wages.
I've got a TV, a fridge and a Cortina. If you ask me it's been
a dog's life from start to finish."

In action, as in words, the new poetry just doesn't get on with
the Welfare State.

2

In the kingdom of consumption the citizen is king. A democratic
monarchy: equality before consumption, fraternity in consumption,
and freedom through consumption. The dictatorship of consumer
goods has finally destroyed the barriers of blood, lineage and
race; this would be good cause for celebration were it not that
consumption, by its logic of things, forbids all qualitative difference
and recognizes only differences of quantity between values and
between men. The distance has not changed between those who possess
a lot and those who possess a small but ever-increasing amount;
but the intermediate stages have multiplied, and have, so to speak,
brought the two extremes, rulers and ruled, closer to the same
centre of mediocrity. To be rich nowadays merely means to possess
a large number of poor objects.

Consumer goods are tending to lose all use-value. Their nature
is to be consumable at all costs. (Recall the recent vogue of
the nothing-box in the USA: an object which cannot be used for
anything at all.) And as General Eisenhower so candidly explained,
the present economic system can only be rescued by turning man
into a consumer, by identifying him with the largest possible
number of consumable values, which is to say, non-values, or empty,
fictitious, abstract values. After being the most precious kind
of capital", in Stalin's happy phrase, man must now become
the most valued of consumer goods. The stereotyped images of the
star, the poor man, the communist, the murderer-for-love, the
law-abiding-citizen, the rebel, the bourgeois, will replace man,
putting in his place a system of multicopy categories arranged
according to the irrefutable logic of robotisation. Already the
idea of 'teenager' tends to define the buyer in conformity with
the product he buys, to reduce his variety to a varied but limited
range of objects in the shops, (Records, guitars, Levis...). You
are no longer as old as you feel or as old as you look, but as
old as what you buy. The time of production-society where 'time
is money' will give way to the Time of consumption, measured in
terms of products bought, worn out and thrown away: a Time of
premature old age, which is the eternal youth of trees and stones.

The truth of the concept of immiseration has been demonstrated
today not, as Marx expected, in the field of goods necessary for
survival, since these, far from becoming scarce, have become more
and more abundant; but rather in relation to survival itself,
which is always the enemy of real life.

Affluence had seemed to promise to all men the Dolce Vita previously
lived by the feudal aristocracy. But in the event affluence and
its comforts are only the children of capitalist productivity,
children doomed to age prematurely as soon as the marketing system
has transformed them into mere objects of passive consumption.
Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume, the
hellish cycle is complete. In the realm of economism, survival
is both necessary and sufficient. This is the fundamental truth
of bourgeois society. But it is also true that a historical period
based on such an antihuman truth can only be a period of transition,
an intermediate stage between the unenlightened life that was
lived by the feudal masters and the life that will be constructed
rationally and passionately by the masters without slaves. Only
thirty years are left if we want to end the transitional period
of slaves without masters before it has lasted two centuries.

3

With regard to everyday life, the bourgeois revolution looks more
like a counter-revolution. The market in human values has rarely
known such a collapse. The aristocratic life with its wealth of
passions and adventures suffered the fate of a palace partitioned
off into furnished rooms, gloomy bedsitters whose drabness is
made even more unbearable by the sign outside which proclaims,
like a challenge hurled at the Universe, that this is the age
of freedom and well-being. From now on hatred gives way to contempt,
love to cohabitation, the ridiculous to the stupid, passion to
sentimentality, desire to envy, reason to calculation, the taste
for life to the fear of death. The utterly contemptible morality
of profit came to replace the utterly detestable morality of honour;
the mysterious and perfectly ridiculous power of birth and blood
gave way to the perfectly ubuesque power of money. The children
of August 4th 1789 took bankers' orders and sales charts as their
coats of arms; mystery was now enshrined in their ledgers.

Wherein lies the mystery of money? Clearly in that it represents
a sum of beings and things that can be appropriated. The nobleman's
coat of arms expresses God's choice and the real power exercised
by his elect; money is only a sign of what might be acquired,
it is a draft on power, a possible choice.

The feudal God, who appeared to be the basis of the social order,
was really only its magnificent crowning excuse. Money, that odourless
god of the bourgeois, is also a mediation; a social contract.
It is a god swayed not by prayers or by promises but by science
and specialist know-how. Its mystery no longer lies in a dark
and impenetrable totality but in the sum of an infinite number
of partial certainties; no longer in the quality of lordship but
in the number of marketable people and things (for example, what
a hundred thousand pounds puts within the reach of its possessor).

In the economy of free-trade capitalism, dominated by imperatives
of production, wealth alone confers power and honour. Master of
the means of production and of labour power, it controls the development
of productive forces and consumer goods and thus its owners have
the pick of the myriad fruits of an infinite progress. However,
as this capitalism transforms itself into its contrary, state-planned
economy, the prestige of the capitalist playing the market with
his millions fades away and with it the caricature of the pot-bellied,
cigar-puffing merchant of human flesh. Today we have managers,
who derive their power from their talent for organization; and
already computers are doing them out of a job. Managers, of course,
do get their monthly paychecks but do they do anything worthwhile
with them? Can they enjoy making their salary signify the wealth
of possible choices before them: building a Xanadou, keeping a
harem, cultivating flower-children? When all possibilities of
consumption are already organized, how can wealth preserve its
representable value? Under the dictatorship of consumer goods,
money melts away like a snowball in hell. Its significance passes
to objects with more representational value, more tangible objects
better adapted to the spectacle of the welfare state. Consumer
goods are already encroaching on the power of money, because wrapped
in ideology, they are the true signs of power. Before long its
only remaining justification will be the quantity of objects and
useless gadgets it enables one to acquire and throw away at an
ever-accelerating pace; only the quantity and the pace matter,
because mass-distribution automatically wipes out quality and
rarity-appeal. From now on the ability to consume, faster and
faster, great quantities of cars, alcohol, houses, TV-sets and
girlfriends will show how far you've got up the hierarchical ladder.
From the superiority of blood to the power of money, from the
superiority of money to the power of the gadget, the nec plus
ultra of Christian/socialist civilization: a civilization of prosaism
and vulgar detail. A nice nest for Nietzsche's little men".

Purchasing power is a license to purchase power. The old proletariat
sold its labour power in order to subsist; what little leisure
time it had was passed pleasantly enough in conversations, arguments,
drinking, making love, wandering, celebrating and rioting. The
new proletarian sells his labour power in order to consume. When
he's not flogging himself to death to get promoted in the labour
hierarchy, he's being persuaded to buy himself objects to distinguish
himself in the social hierarchy. The ideology of consumption becomes
the consumption of ideology. The cultural détente between
east and west is not accidental! On the one hand, homo consomator
buys a bottle of whisky and gets as a free gift the lie that accompanies
it. On the other, Communist man buys ideology and gets as a free
gift a bottle of vodka. Paradoxically, Soviet and capitalist regimes
are taking a common path, the first thanks to their economy of
production, the second thanks to their economy of consumption.

In the USSR, the surplus labour of the workers does not, strictly
speaking, directly enrich their comrade the director of the enterprise.
it simply strengthens his power as an organizer and a bureaucrat.
His surplus-value is a surplus-value of power. (But this new-style
surplus-value is nevertheless subject to the tendency for the
rate of profit to fall. Marx's laws of economic life are confirmed
today in the economy of life.) He earns it, not on the basis of
money-capital, but on the basis of a primitive accumulation of
confidence-capital gained by his docile absorption of ideological
matter. The car and the dacha which are thrown in to reward his
services to the Socialist Fatherland, to Output and the Cause,
foretell a form of social organization in which money will indeed
have disappeared, giving way to honorific distinctions of rank,
a mandarinate of the biceps and of specialized thought. (Remember
the special treatment given to Stakhanovites, to 'heroes of space'
and scrapers of catgut and canvas.)

In capitalist countries, the material profit gained by the employer
from both production and consumption is still distinct from the
ideological profit which the employer is no longer alone in deriving
from the organization of consumption. This is all that prevents
us from reducing the difference between manager and worker to
the difference between a new Jaguar every year and a mini lovingly
maintained for five. But we must recognize that the tendency is
towards planning, and planning tends to quantify social differences
in terms of the ability to consume and to make others consume.
With the differences growing in number and shrinking in significance,
the real differences between rich and poor is diminishing, and
mankind is levelled into mere variations on poverty. The culmination
of the process would be a cybernetic society composed of specialists
ranked hierarchically according to their aptitude for consuming
and making others consume the doses of power necessary for the
functioning of a gigantic social computer of which they themselves
would be simultaneously the programme and the printout. A society
of exploited exploiters where some slaves are more equal than
others.

There remains the third world. There remain the old forms of oppression.
That the serfs of the latifundia should be the contemporaries
of the new proletariat seems to me a perfect formula for the explosive
mixture from which the total revolution will be born. Who would
dare to suppose that the South American Indians will be satisfied
with land reform and lay down their arms when the best-paid workers
in Europe are demanding a radical change in their way of life?
From now on, the revolt against the State of Well-Being sets the
minimum demands for world revolution. You can choose to forget
this, but you forget it at your peril... as Saint-Just said, those
who make a revolution by halves do nothing but dig their own graves.

VIII EXCHANGE AND GIFT

The nobility and the proletariat conceive human relationships
on the model of giving, but the proletarian way of giving
supersedes the feudal gift. The bourgeoisie, the class of
exchange, is the lever which enables the feudal project to
be overthrown and superseded in the long revolution (1). History
is the continuous transformation of natural alienation into social
alienation, and the continuous strengthening of a contradictory
movement of opposition which will overcome all alienation and
end history. The historical struggle against natural alienation
transforms natural alienation into social alienation, but the
movement of historical disalienation eventually attacks social
alienation itself and reveals that it is based on magic. This
magic has to do with privative appropriation. It is expressed
through sacrifice. Sacrifice is the archaic form of exchange.
The extreme quantification of exchange reduces man to an object.
From this rock bottom a new type of human relationship, involving
neither exchange nor sacrifice, can be born (2).

1

The bourgeoisie administers a precarious and none-too-glorious
interregnum between the sacred hierarchy of feudalism and the
anarchic order of future classless societies. The bourgeois no-man's-land
of exchange is the uninhabitable region separating the old, unhealthy
pleasure of giving oneself, in which the aristocrats indulged,
and the pleasure of giving through love of oneself, which the
new generations of proletarians are little by little beginning
to discover.

'Fair exchange' is the favourite absurdity of capitalism and its
essentially similar competitors. The USSR 'offers' its hospitals
and technicians, just as the USA 'offers' its investments and
good offices, and supermarkets 'offer' 'free gifts'.

But the fact is that the meaning of giving has been rooted
out from our minds, feelings and actions. Remember Breton and
his friends offering roses to the pretty girls on the Boulevard
Poissoniere, and immediately arousing the suspicion and hostility
of the public.

The infection of human relations by exchange and bargaining is
plainly linked to the existence of the bourgeoisie. The fact that
exchange persists in a part of the world where it is claimed that
there is a classless society suggests that the shadow of the bourgeoisie
continues to rule under the red flag. Especially as the pleasure
of giving, which appears in all industrial societies, defines
very clearly the frontier between the world of calculation and
the world of exuberance, of festivity. This style of giving has
nothing to do with the prestige-gift practiced by the nobility,
hopelessly imprisoned by the notion of sacrifice. The proletariat
really does carry the project of human fullness, the project of
total life: a project in which the aristocracy had failed, albeit
failed magnificently. But let's give the devil his due: it is
through the historical presence and mediation of the bourgeoisie
that such a future becomes accessible to the proletariat. Is it
not thanks to the technical progress and the productive forces
developed by capitalism that the proletariat is in a position
to realize, through the scientifically elaborated project of a
new society, the egalitarian visions, the dreams of omnipotence
and the desire to live without dead time? Today everything
confirms the mission, or rather the historical opportunity of
the proletariat: the destruction and supersession of feudalism.
And it will do it by trampling underfoot the bourgeoisie, which
is doomed to represent merely a transitional period in the development
of man, albeit a transitional period without which the superseding
of the feudal project would have been inconceivable: an essential
stage, then, which created the lever without which unitary power
would never have been overthrown, and above all could never have
been transformed and corrected according to the project of the
whole man. The invention of God shows that unitary power was already
a world for the whole man, but for a whole man standing on his
head. All that was required was to turn it right side up.

No liberation is possible this side of economics; in the world
defined by economics there is only a hypothetical economics of
survival. With these two truths the bourgeoisie is spurring mankind
on towards the supersession of economics, towards a point beyond
history. So the bourgeoisie is doing an even greater service than
that of putting technology at the service of poetry. Its greatest
day will be the day it disappears.

2

Exchange is linked to the survival of primitive hordes in the
same way as privative appropriation; both together constitute
the fundamental axiom on which the history of mankind has been
built up to the present day.

When the first men found that it gave them more security in the
face of a hostile nature, the formation of hunting territories
laid the foundations of a social organization which has imprisoned
us ever since. (Cf.Raoul and Laura Makarius: Totem et exagomie.)
Primitive man's unity with nature is essentially magical. Man
only really separates himself from nature by transforming it through
technology, and as he transforms it he disenchants it. But the
use of technology is determined by social organization. The birth
of society coincides with the invention of the tool. More: organization
itself is the first coherent technique of struggle against nature.
Social organization -- hierarchical, since it is based on private
appropriation -- gradually destroys the magical bond between man
and nature, but it preserves the magic for its own use: it creates
between itself and mankind a mythical unity modelled on the original
participation in the mystery of nature. Framed by the 'natural'
relations of prehistoric man, social organization slowly dissolves
this frame that defines and imprisons it. From this point of view,
history is just the transformation of natural alienation into
social alienation: a process of disalienation becomes a process
of social alienation, a movement of liberation only produces new
chains; until the will for human liberation launches a direct
attack upon the whole collection of paralyzing mechanisms, that
is on the social organization based on privative appropriation.
This is the movement of disalienation which will undo history
and realize it in new modes of life.

Effectively, the bourgeoisie's accession to power represents man's
victory over natural forces. But as soon as this happens, hierarchical
social organization, which was born out of the struggle against
hunger, sickness, discomfort... loses its justification, and can
no longer escape taking full responsibility for the malaise of
industrial civilizations. Today men no longer blame their sufferings
on the hostility of nature, but on the tyranny of a perfectly
inadequate and perfectly anachronistic form of society. When it
destroyed the magical power of the feudal lords, the bourgeoisie
pronounced the death sentence on the magic of hierarchical power
itself. The proletariat will carry out this sentence. What the
bourgeoisie began by historical processes will now be finished
off in opposition to its own narrow conception of history. But
it will still be a historical struggle, a class struggle which
will realize history.

The hierarchical principle is the magic spell that has blocked
the path of men in their historical struggles for freedom. From
now on, no revolution will be worthy of the name if it does not
involve, at the very least, the radical elimination of all hierarchy.

*

As soon as the members of a horde mark out a hunting territory
and claim private ownership of it, they find themselves confronted
by a hostility which is no longer the hostility of wild animals,
weather, inhospitable regions, or sickness, but that of human
groups who are excluded from the hunting-grounds. Man's genius
found a way out of the animal dilemma: destroy the rival group
or be destroyed by it. This way was through treaties, contracts
and exchanges, which are the basis of primitive communities. Between
the period of nomadic food-gathering hordes and that of agricultural
societies, the survival of clans required a triple exchange: exchange
of women, exchange of food and exchange of blood. Magical thinking
provides this operation with a supreme controller, a master of
exchanges, a power beyond and above the contracting parties. The
birth of the gods coincides with the twin birth of sacred myth
and hierarchical power.

Of course this exchange is never of equal benefit to both clans.
The problem is always to ensure the neutrality of the excluded
clan without actually letting it into the hunting territory. And
agricultural societies refined these tactics. The excluded class,
who were tenants before they became slaves, enter the landowning
group not as landowners, but as their degraded reflection (the
famous myth of the Fall), the mediation between the land and its
masters. Why do they submit? Because of the coherent hold over
them exercised by the myth -- although it's not the deliberate
intention of the masters (that would be to credit them with a
rationality which was still foreign to them). This myth conceals
the cunning of exchange, the imbalance in the sacrifice which
each side agrees to make. The excluded class really sacrifice
an important part of their life to the landowner: they accept
his authority and work for him. The master mythically sacrifices
his authority and his power as landowner to the dominated class:
he is ready to pay for the safety of his people. God is the underwriter
of the transaction and the defender of the myth. He punishes those
who break the contract, while those who keep it he rewards with
power: mythical power for those who sacrifice themselves in reality,
real power for those who sacrifice themselves in myth. History
and mythology show that the master could go as far as to sacrifice
his life to the mythical principle. The fact that he payed the
price of the alienation which he imposed on others reinforced
the master's divine character. But it seems that a make-believe
execution, or one in which he was replaced by a deputy, soon released
the master from such a hard bargain. When the Christian God delegated
his son to the world, he gave generations of bosses a perfect
model by which to authenticate their own sacrifice.

Sacrifice is the archaic form of exchange. It is a magical exchange,
unquantified, irrational. it dominated human relationships, including
commercial relationships, until merchant capitalism and its money-the-measure-of-all-things
had carved out such a large area in the world of slaves, serfs
and burghers that the economy could appear as a particular zone,
a domain separated from life. When money appears, the element
of exchange in the feudal gift begins to win out. The sacrifice-gift,
the potlatch -- that exchange-game of loser-takes-all in which
the size of the sacrifice determines the prestige of the giver
-- could hardly find a place in a rationalized exchange economy.
Forced out of the sectors dominated by economic imperatives, it
finds itself reincarnated in values such as hospitality, friendship
and love: refuges doomed to disappear as the dictatorship of quantified
exchange (market value) colonises everyday life and turns it into
a market.

Merchant and industrial capitalism accelerated the quantification
of exchange. The feudal gift was rationalized according to the
rigorous model of commerce. The game of exchange became a matter
of calculation. The playful Roman promise to sacrifice a cock
to the gods in exchange for a peaceful voyage remained outside
the grasp of commercial measurement because of the disparity of
the things that were exchanged. And we can well imagine that the
age in which a man like Fourquet could ruin himself in order to
shine more brightly in the eyes of his contemporaries produced
a poetry which has disappeared from our times, which take as their
model of a human relationship the exchange of 35p for an 8oz.
steak.

And so sacrifice came to be quantified, rationalized, measured
out and quoted on the stock exchange. But what is left of the
magic of sacrifice in a world of market values? And what is left
of the magic of power, the sacred terror that impels the model
employee to tip his hat respectfully to the boss? In a society
where the quantity of gadgets and ideologies produced represents
the quantity of power consumed, exercised and used up, magical
relationships evaporate, leaving hierarchical power exposed to
the full blast of opposition. When the last bastion falls, it
will be either the end of a world or the end of the world. It's
up to us to knock it down before it falls down by itself and drags
us all with it.

Rigorously quantified, first by money and then by what you might
call 'sociometric units of power', exchange pollutes all our relationships,
all our feelings, all our thoughts. Where exchange is dominant,
only things are left: a world of thing-men plugged into
the organization charts of the computer freaks: the world of reification.
But on the other hand it also gives us the chance radically to
restructure our styles of life and thought. A rock bottom from
which everything can start again.

*

The feudal mind seemed to conceive the gift as a sort of haughty
refusal to exchange, a will to deny interchangeability. This refusal
went with their contempt for money and common measurement. Of
course, sacrifice excludes pure giving; but there was often so
much room for play, humanity and gratuitous gestures that inhumanity,
religion and seriousness could pass for accessories to such preoccupations
as war, love, friendship, or hospitality.

By giving themselves, the nobility united their power with the
totality of cosmic forces and claimed control over the totality
which myth had made sacred. The bourgeoisie exchanged being
for having and lost the mythical unity of being and the
world: the totality fell into fragments. Semi-rational exchange
in production implicitly makes a creativity that is reduced to
labour-power equal in value to its hourly wage. Semi-rational
exchange in consumption implicitly makes consumer-experience (life
reduced to the activity of consumption) equal in value to an amount
of power which indicates the consumer's position in the hierarchical
organization chart. The sacrifice of the master is followed by
the last stage of sacrifice, the sacrifice of the specialist.

In order to consume, the specialist makes others consume according
to a cybernetic programme whose hyperrationality of exchange will
abolish sacrifice... and man. If pure exchange ever comes to regulate
the modes of existence of the robot-citizens of the cybernetic
democracy, sacrifice will cease to exist. Objects need no justification
to make them obedient. Sacrifice forms no part of the programme
of machines, or of the antagonistic project, the project of the
whole man.

*

The crumbling away of human values under the influence of exchange
mechanisms leads to the crumbling of exchange itself. The insufficiency
of the feudal gift means that new human relationships must be
built on the principle of pure giving. We must rediscover the
pleasure of giving: giving because you have so much. What beautiful
and priceless potlatches the affluent society will see -- whether
it likes it or not! -- when the exuberance of the younger generation
discovers the pure gift. The growing passion for stealing books,
clothes, food, weapons or jewelry simply for the pleasure of giving
them away gives us a glimpse of what the will to live has in store
for consumer society.

Prefabricated needs are confronted with the unitary need for a
new style of life. Art, the economics of experience, has been
absorbed by the market. Desires and dreams work for Madison Avenue
now. Everyday life has crumbled into a series of moments as interchangeable
as the gadgets which occupy them: mixers, stereograms, contraceptives,
euphorimeters, sleeping pills. Everywhere equal particles vibrate
in the uniform light of power. Equality, justice. Exchange of
nothings, restrictions and prohibitions. Nothing moving, only
dead time passing.

We will have to renew our acquaintance with the feudal imperfection,
not in order to make it perfect but in order to supersede it.
We will have to rediscover the harmony of unitary society and
liberate it from the divine phantom and the sacred hierarchy.
The new innocence is not so far removed from the ordeals and judgments
of God: the inequality of blood is closer to the equality of free
individuals, irreducible to one another, than bourgeois equality
is. The cramped style of the nobility is only a crude sketch of
the grand style which will be invented by masters without slaves.
But what a world is trapped between this style of life and the
mere way of living on, surviving, which ravages so many existences
in our time!

IX TECHNOLOGY AND ITS MEDIATED USE

Contrary to the interests of those who
control its use, technology tends to disenchant the world. Mass
consumption society strips gadgets of any magical value. Similarly,
organisation (a technique for handling new techniques) robs new
productive forces of their subversive appeal and their power of
disruption. Organisation thus stands revealed as nothing but the
pure organisation of authority (1). Alienated mediations make
man weaker as they become indispensible. A social mask disguises
people and things. In the present stage of privative appropriation,
this mask transforms its wearers into dead things, commodities.
Nature no longer exists. To rediscover nature means to reinvent
it as a worthwhile adversary by constructing new social relationships.
With the expansion of material equipment, the old hierarchical
society is bursting at the seams (2)

1

The same bankruptcy is evident in non-industrial civilisations,
where people are still dying of starvation, and automated civilisations,
where people are already dying od boredom. Every paradise is artificial.
The life of a Trobriand islander, rich in spite of ritual and
taboo, is at the mercy of a smallpox epidemic; the life of an
ordinary Swede, poor in spite of his comforts, is at the mercy
of suicide and survival sickness.

Rousseauism and pastoral idylls accompany the first throbbings
of the industrial machine. The ideology of progress, as one finds
it in Condorcet or Adam Smith, emerged from the old myth of the
Four Ages. With the age of iron leading into the golden age, it
seemed 'natural' that progress should fulfil itself as
a return: a return to the state of innocence before the Fall.

The belief in the magical power of technology goes hand in hand
with its opposite, the movement of disenchantment. The machine
is the model of the intelligible. There is no mystery, nothing
obscure in its drive-belts, cogs and gears; it can all be explained
perfectly. But the machine is also the miracle that is to transport
man into the realms of happiness and freedom. Besides, this ambiguity
is useful to its masters: the old con about happy tomorrows and
the green grass over the hill operates at various levels to justify
the rational exploitation of men today. Thus it is not the logic
of disenchantment that shakes people's faith in progress so much
as the inhuman use of technical potential, the way that its mystical
justification begins to grate. While the labouring classes and
the underdeveloped peoples still offered the spectacle of their
slowly decreasing material poverty, the enthusiasm for progress
still drew ample nourishment from the troughs of liberal ideology
and its extension, socialism. But, a century after the spontaneous
demystification of the Lyons workers, when they smashed the looms,
a general crisis broke out, springing this time from the crisis
of big industry: Fascist regression, sickly dreams of a return
to artisanry and corporatism, the Ubuesque master-race of blond
beasts.

Today, the promises of the old society of production are raining
down on our heads in an avalanche of consumer goods that nobody
would venture to call mana from heaven. You can hardly believe
in the magical power of gadgets in the same way as people used
to believe in productive forces. There is a certain hagiographical
literature on the steam hammer. One cannot imagine much on the
electric toothbrush. The mass production of instruments of comfort
-- all equally revolutionary according to the publicity handouts
-- has given the most unsophisticated of men the right to express
an opinion on the marvels of technological innovation in a tone
as familiar as the hand he sticks up the barmaid's skirt. The
first landing on Mars will pass unnoticed on Blackpool beach.

Admittedly, the yoke and harness, the steam engine, electricity
and the rise of nuclear energy all disturbed and altered the infrastructure
of society (though this was almost accidental). But today it would
be foolish to expect new productive forces to upset modes of production.
The blossoming of technology has seen the birth of a super-technology
of synthesis which could prove as important as the social community,
that first of all technical syntheses, founded at the dawn of
time. Perhaps more important still; for if cybernetics was taken
from its masters, it might be able to free human groups from labour
and from social alienation. This was precisely the project of
Charles Fourier in an age when utopia was still possible.

But between Fourier and the cyberneticians who control the operational
organisation of technology lies the distance between freedom and
slavery. Of course, the cybernetic project claims that it is already
sufficiently developed to be able to solve all the problems raised
by the appearance of a new technique. But don't you believe it

1: The permanent development of productive forces, the exploding
mass production of consumer goods, promise nothing. Musical air-conditioners
and solar-ovens stand unheralded and unsung. We see a weariness
coming, and one that is already so obviously present that sooner
or later it's bound to develop into a critique of organisation
itself

2: For all its flexibility, the cybernetic synthesis will never
be able to conceal the fact that it is only the superseding synthesis
of the different forms of government that have ruled over men,
and their final stage. How could it hope to disguise the inherent
alienation that no power has ever managed to shield from the weapons
of criticism and the criticism of weapons?

By laying down the basis for a perfect power structure, the cyberneticians
will only stimulate the perfection of refusal. Their programming
of new techniques will be shattered by the same techniques turned
to its own use by another kind of organisation. A revolutionary
organisation

2

Technocratic organisation raises technical mediation to its highest
point of coherence. It has been known for ages that the master
uses the slave as a means to appropriate the objective world,
that the tool only alienates the worker as long as it belongs
to a master. Similarly in the realm of consumption: it's not the
goods that are inherently alienating, but the conditioning that
leads their buyers to choose them and the ideology in which they
are wrapped. The tool in production and the conditioning of choice
in consumption are the mainstays of the fraud: they are the mediations
which move man the producer and man the consumer to the illusion
of action in a real passivity and transform him
into an essentially dependent thing. The stolen mediations separate
the individual from himself, his desires, his dreams, and his
will to live; and so people come to believe in th myth that you
can't do without them, or the power that governs them. Where power
fails to paralyse with constraints, it paralyses by suggestion:
by forcing everyone to use crutches of which it is the sole supplier.
Power as the sum of alienating mediations is only waiting for
the holy water of cybernetics to baptise it into the state of
Totality. But total power does not exist, only totalitarian powers.
And the baptism of cybernetics has already been cancelled owing
to lack of interest.

Because the objective world (or nature, if you prefer) has been
grasped by means of alienated mediations (tools, thoughts, false
needs), it ends up surrounded by a sort of screen: so that, paradoxically,
the more man transforms himself and the world, the more it becomes
alien to him. The veil of social relations envelops the natural
world totally. What we call 'natural' today is about as natural
as Nature Girl lipstick. The instruments of praxis do not belong
to the agents of praxis, the workers: and it is obviously because
of this that the opaque zone that separates man from himself and
from nature has become a part of man and a part of nature. Our
task is not to rediscover nature but to make a new one, to reconstruct
it.

The search for the real nature, for a natural life that has nothing
to do with the lie of social ideology, is one of the most touching
naïvetés of a good part of the revolutionary proletariat,
not to mention the anarchists and such notable figures as the
young Wilhelm Reich.

In the realm of the exploitation of man by man, the real transformation
of nature only takes place through the real transformation of
the social fraud. At no point in their struggle have man and nature
ever been really face to face. They have been kept apart by what
mediates this struggle: hierarchical social power and its organisation
of appearance. To transform nature was to socialise it, but they
certainly made a mess of the job. There is no nature other than
social nature, since history has never known a society without
power.

Is an earthquake a natural phenomenon? It affects men, but it
affects them only as alienated social beings. What is an earthquake-in-itself?
Suppose that at this moment there was an earthquake disaster on
Alpha Centauri. Who would it bother apart from the old farts in
the universities and other centres of pure thought?

And death: death also strikes men socially. In the first place,
because the energy and resources poured down the drain of militarism
and wasted in the anarchy of capitalism and bureaucracy could
make a vital contribution to the scientific struggle against death.
But above all because it is in the vast laboratory of society
(and under the benevolent eye of science) that the foul brew of
culture in which the germs of death are spawned is kept on the
boil; (stress, nervous tension, conditioning, pollution, latrogenic
disease...) Only animals are still allowed to die a natural death...
some of them.

Could it be that, after disengaging themselves from the animal
world by means of their history, men might come to envy the animal's
contact with nature? This is, I think, the childish meaning which
should be seen in the search for the 'natural'. But if we could
enrich it and set it off in the right direction such a desire
would mean that we had superseded 30,000 years of history.

Wgat we have to do now is to create a new nature that will be
a worthwhile adversary: that is, to resocialise it by liberating
the technical apparatus from the sphere of alienation, by snatching
it from the hands of rulers and specialists. Only at the end of
a process of social disalienation will nature become a worthwhile
opponent: in a society in which man's creativity will not come
up against man himself as the first obstacle to its expansion

*

Technological organisation can't be destroyed from the outside.
It's collapse is the result of internal decay. Far from being
punished for its Promethean aspirations, it is dying because it
never escaped from the dialectic of master and slave. Even if
the cybernauts did come to power they'd have a hard time staying
there. The very best they can offer has already been turned down
in these words from a black worker to a white boss (Presence Africaine,
1956): "When we first saw your trucks and planes we thought
that you were gods. Then, after a few years we learned how to
drive your trucks, as we shall soon learn how to fly your planes,
and we understood that what interested you most was manufacturing
trucks and planes and making money. For our part, what we are
interested in is using them. Now, you are just our metal-workers."

X DOWN QUANTITY STREET

Economic imperatives seek to impose on
the whole of human activity the standardised measuring system
of the market. Very large quantities take the place of the qualitative,
but even quantity is rationed and economised. Myth is based on
quality, ideology on quantity. Ideological saturation is an atomisation
into small contradictory quantities which can no more avoid destroying
one another than they can avoid being smashed by the qualitative
negativity of popular refusal (1). The quantitative and the linear
are indissociable. A linear, measured time and a linear, measured
life are the definitions of survival, or living on: a succession
of inter-changeable instants. These lines are part of the confused
geometry of power (2)

1

The system of commercial exchange has come to govern all of man's
everyday relations with himself and with his fellow men. Every
aspect of public and private life is dominated by the quantitative.

The merchant in The Exception and the Rule confesses: "I
don't know what a man is. Only that every man has his price."
To the extent that individuals accept power and enable it to exist,
power in turn judges them by its own yard-stick: it reduces and
standardises them. What is the individual to an authoritarian
system? A point duly located in its perspective. A point that
it recognises, certainly, but recognises only in terms of the
number that define its position in a system of co-ordinates.

The calculation of a man's capacity to produce or to make others
produce, to consume or to make others consume, concretises to
a T that expression so dear to our philosophers: the measure
of man. Even the simple pleasures of a ride in the country
are generally measured up in terms of miles on the clock, speeds
reached and petrol consumption. With the rate at which economic
'imperatives' are buying up feelings, desires and needs and falsifying
them, man will soon be left with nothing but the memory of having
once been alive. Living in the past: the memory of days gone by
will be our consolation for living on. How could even spontaneous
laughter last in a space-time that is measured and measurable,
let alone real joy? At best the dull contentment of the man-who's-got-his-money's-worth,
and who exists by that standard. Only objects can be measured,
which is why exchange always reifies

*

Any excitement that could still be found in the pursuit of pleasure
is fast disintegrating into a panting succession of mechanical
gestures, and one hopes in vain that their rhythm will speed up
enought to reach even the semblance of orgasm. The quantitative
Eros of speed, novelty, love-against-the-clock is disfiguring
the real face of pleasure everywhere.

The qualitative is slowly taking on the aspect of a quantitative
infinity, an endless series whose momentary end is always the
negation of pleasure, Don Juan's basic "can't get no satisfaction".
If only contemporary society would encourage such dissatisfaction,
and allow total licence to the delirious and devastating attractions
of an insatiable appetite! Who would deny that there is a certain
charm in the life of an idler, a trifle blasé perhaps,
but enjoying at his leisure everything that can make passivity
sweet: a seraglio of pretty girls, witty and sophisticated friends,
subtle drugs, seven-course Chinese meals, heady liqueurs and sultry
perfumes: a man whose desire is not so much to change life as
to seek refuge in the greatest attractions it has to offer. A
libertine in the grand style.

Let's talk sense, though. Nowadays that kind of choice just doesn't
exist, for in both Western and Eastern societies even quantity
is rationed. A tycoon with only on emonth left to livewould still
refuse to blow his entire fortune on one huge orgy... the morality
of exchange and profit doesn't let go that easily. Thrift, the
capitalist economics of family life.

Yet what a windfall for mystification, to have the qualitative
imprisoned in the skin of the quantitative! I mean that a world
in which all things seem possible can still harbour the illusion
of being a world of many dimensions. But to let exchange be subsumed
by the gift, to let all kinds of adventures blossom between heaven
and earth (from Gilles de Rais to Dante...) this was precisely
what the bourgeoisie couldn't do, this was the door that it had
closed on itself in the name of industry and commerce! All it
had left was a vast nostalgia. Poor and precious catalyst -- at
once all and nothing -- thanks to which a society without class
and without authoritarian power will come to realise all the dreams
of its aristocratic childhood.

In the act of faith, the unitary societies of tribal and feudal
times possessed a qualitative element of myth and mystification
which was of major importance. The bourgeoisie, once it had shattered
the unity of power and God, found itself clutching fragments and
crumbs of power, crumbs which it tried to clothe with a unitary
spirit. But it didn't work. Without unity there can be no qualitative!
Democracy triumphs along with social atomisation. Democracy is
the limited power of the greatest number, and the power of the
greatest limited number. The great ideologies very soon abandon
faith for numbers. Nowadays 'La Patrie' is no more than a few
thousand war veterans. And what Marx and Engels used to call 'our
party' is today a few million voters and a couple of thousand
bill-stickers: a mass party.

In fact, ideology draws its essence from quantity: it is simply
an idea reproduced again and again in time (Pavlovian conditioning)
and in space (where the consumers take over). Ideology, information
and culture tend more and more to lose their content and become
pure quantity. The less importance a piece of news has, the more
it is repeated, and the more it distracts people from their real
problems. Goebbels said that the bigger the lie, the more easily
it is swallowed. But ideology takes us away from the Big Lie by
constantly bidding against itself. One after another it lays before
us a hundred paperbacks, a hundred washing powders, a hundred
political ideas, and with equal conviction proves that each of
them is incontestably superior to any of the others. Even in ideology
quantity is being destroyed by quantity itself: conflicting conditionings
end by cancelling each other out. Is this the way to rediscover
the power of the qualitative ,a power that can move mountains?

Quite the contrary. Contradictory conditioning is more likely
to end in trauma, inhibition and a radical refusal to be brainwashed
any more. Admittedly ideology still has one trick up its sleeve
-- that of posing false questions, raising false dilemmas and
leaving the conditioned individual, poor bugger, with the worry
of sorting out which is the truer of two lies. But such pointless
diversions carry little weight compared with the survival sickness
to which consumer society exposes its members.

Boredom breeds the irresistible rejection of uniformity, a refusal
that can break out at any moment. Stockholm, Amsterdam and Watts
(for a start) have shown that the tiniest of pretexts can fire
the oil spread on troubled waters. Think of the vast quantity
of lies that can be wiped out by one act of revolutionary poetry!
From Villa to Lumumba, from Stockholm to Watts, qualitative agitation,
the agitation that radicalises the masses because it springs from
the radicalism of the masses, is redefining the frontiers of submission
and degradation

2

In unitary regimes the sacred was the cement which held together
the social pyramid in which each particular being from the highest
lord to the lowest serf had his place according to the will of
Providence, the order of the world and the king's pleasure. The
cohesion of the structure soon disappeared, dissolved by the corrosive
criticism of the young bourgeoisie; but, as we know, the shadow
of the divine hierarchy remains. The dismantling of the pyramid,
far from destroying the inhuman cement, only pulverises it. We
see little particular beings becoming absolute: little 'citizens'
released by social atomisation. The inflated imagination of egocentricity
creates a universe on the model of one point, a point just the
same as thousands of other points, grains of sand, all free, equal
and fraternal, scurrying here and there like so many ants when
their nest is broken open. All the lines have gone haywire since
God disappeared, depriving them of their point of convergence;
they weave and collide in apparent disorder. But make no mistake,
despite the anarchy of competition and the isolation of individualism,
class and caste interests are beginning to tie up, structuring
a geometry, and impatient to reconquer its coherence.

Now, the coherence of unitary power, although it's based on the
divine principle, is a palpable coherence, which each individual
lives in and knows. But paradoxically the material principle of
fragmentary power can only furnish an abstract coherence. How
could the organisation of economic survival hope to substitute
itself smoothly for this immanent, this omnipresent God who is
called on to witness the most trivial gestures, like cutting bread
and sneezing...? The omnipotence of the feudal mode of domination
was quite relative anyway, but let us suppose that with the aid
of cyberneticians it could be equalled by a secularised government
of men. Even so, how could anyone replace the mythic and poetic
ethos surrounding the life of communities thast are socially cohesive,
an ethos that provides them with some kind of third dimension?
The bourgeoisie is well and truly caught in the trap of its own
half-revolution

*

Quantification implies linearity. the qualitative is plurivalent,
the quantitative univocal. Life quantified becomes a measured
route-march towards death. The radiant ascent of the soul towards
heaven is replaced by inane speculations about the future. Moments
of time no longer radiate, as they did in the cyclical time of
earlier societies; time is a thread stretching from birth to death,
from memories of the past to expectations of the future, on which
an eternity of survival strings out a row of instants and hybrid
presents nibbled away by what is past an what is yet to come.

The feeling of living in symbiosis with cosmic forces -- the sense
of the simultaneous -- revealed to our forefathers joy which our
passing presence in the world is hard put to provide. What remains
of such a joy? Only vertigo, giddy transcience, the effort of
keeping up with the times. You must move with the times -- the
motto of those who make a profit out of it.

Not that we should lament the passing of the old days of cyclical
time, the time of mystical effusion. Rather correct it: centre
it in man, and not in the divine animal. Man is not the centre
of present time, he is merely a point in it. Time is composed
of a succession of points, each taken independently of the others
like an absolute, but an absolute that is endlessly repeated and
rehashed. Because they are located on the same line, all actions
and all moments assume equal importance. The definition of prosaism.
Down quantity street, everything's always just the same. And these
absolutized fragments are all quite interchangeable. Divided from
one another -- and thus separated from man himself -- the moments
of survival follow one another and resemble one another just like
the specialised attitudes that correspond to them: roles. Making
love or riding a motorbike, it's all the same. Each moment has
its stereotype, and the fragments of time carry off the fragments
of men into a past that can never be changed.

What's the use of threading pearls to make a garland of memories?
If only the weight of the pearls would snap the thread! But no:
moment by moment, time bores on; everything is lost, nothing created...

What do I want? Not a succession of moments, but one huge instant.
A totality that is lived and without the experience of 'time passing'.
The feeling of 'time passing' is simply the feeling of growing
old. And yet, since one must first of all survive in order to
live, virtual moments, possibilities, are necessarily rooted in
that time. To federate moments, to bring out the pleasure in them,
to release their promise of life is already to be learning how
to construct a 'situation'

*

Individual survival-lines cross, collide and intersect. Each one
assigns limits to the freedom of others; projects cancel one another
out in the name of their autonomy. This is the basis of the geometry
of fragmentary power.

We think we are living in the world, when in fact we are being
positioned in a perspective. No longer the simultaneous perspective
of primitive painters, but the perspective of the Renaissance
rationalists. It is hardly possible for looks, thoughts and gestures
to escape the attraction of the distant vanishing-point which
orders and deforms them; situates them in its spectacle. Power
is the greatest town-planner. It parcels out loys of public and
private survival, buys up vacant lots at cut price, and only permits
construction that complies with its regulations. Its own plans
involve the compulsory acquisition of everybody. It builds with
a heaviness which is the envy of the real town-builders that copy
its style, translating the old mumbo-jumbo of the sacred hierarchy
into stockbroker-belts, white collar apartments and workers flats.
(Like, for example, in Croydon)

The reconstruction of life, the rebuilding of the world: one and
the same desire.

XI MEDIATED ABSTRACTION AND ABSTRACT MEDIATION

Today, reality is imprisoned in metaphysics
in the same way as it was once imprisoned in theology. The way
of seeing which power imposes, 'abstracts' mediations from their
original function, which is to extend into the real world the
demands which arise in lived experience; it resists the magnetic
pull of authority. The point where resistance begins is the look-out
post of subjectivity. Until now, metaphysicians have only organised
the world in various ways; the point is to change it, by opposing
them (1). The regime of guaranteed survival is slowly undermining
the belief that power is necessary (2). This leads to a growing
rejection of the forms which govern us, a rejection of their (coercive)
ordering principle. (3) Radical theory, which is the only guarantee
of the coherence of such a rejection, penetrates the masses because
it extends their spontaneous creativity. "Revolutionary"
ideology is theory which has been recuperated by the authorities.
Words exist as the frontier between the will to live and its repression;
the way they are employed determines their meaning; history controls
the way in which they are employed. The historical crisis of language
indicates the possibility of superseding
it towards the poetry of action, towards the great game with signs
(4)

1

What is this detour in which I get lost when I try to find myself?
What is this screen that separates me from myself under the pretence
of protecting me? And how can I ever find myself again in this
crumbling fragmentation of which I am composed? I move forward
with a terrible doubt of ever getting to grips with myself. It
is as though my path is already marked out in front of me, my
thoughts and feelings following the contours of a mental landscape
which they imagine they are creating, but which in fact is moulding
them. An absurd force -- all the more absurd for being part of
the rationality of the world, and seeming incontestable -- keeps
me jumping in an effort to reach a solid ground which my feet
have never left. And by this useless leap towards myself I succeed
only in losing my grip on the present; most of the time I live
out of step with what I am, marking time with dead time.

I think that people are surprisingly insensitive to the way in
which the world, in certain periods, takes on the forms
of the dominant metaphysic. No matter how daft it may seem to
us to believe in God and the Devil, this phantom pair become a
living reality the moment that a collectivity considers them sufficiently
present to inspire the text of their laws. In the same way, the
stupid distinction between cause and effect has been able to govern
societies in which human behaviour and phenomenae in general were
analysed in terms of cause and effect. And in our own time, nobody
should underestimate the power of the misbegotten dichotomy between
thought and action, theory and practice, real and imaginary...
these ideas are forces of organisation. The world of falsehood
is a real world, people are killing one another there, and we'd
better not forget it. While we spiel and spout ironically about
the decay of philosophy, contemporary philosophers watch with
knowing smiles from behind the mediocrity of their thought; they
know that come what may the world is still a philosophical construction,
a huge ideological foozle. We survive in a metaphysical landscape.
The abstract and alienating mediation which estranges me from
myself is terrifyingly concrete.

Grace, a piece of God transplanted into man, outlived its Donor.
Secularized, abandoning theology for metaphysics, it remained
buried in the individual's flesh like a pace-maker, an internalised
mode of government. When Freudian imagery hangs the monster Superego
over the doorway of the ego, its fault is not so much facile oversimplification
as refusal to search further for the social origin of constraints.
(Reich understood this well.) Oppression reigns because men are
divided, not only among themselves, but also inside themselves.
What separates them from themselves and weakens them is laos the
false bond that unites them with power, reinforcing this power
and making them choose it as their protector, as their father.

"Mediation", says Hegel, "is self-identity in movement."
But what moves can lose itself. And when he adds "it is the
moment of dying and becoming", the same words
differ radically in meaning according to the perspective in which
they are placed: that of totalitarian power or that of the total
man.

As soon as mediation escapes my control, every step I take drags
me towards something foreign and inhuman. Engels painstakingly
showed that a stone, a fragment of nature alien to man, became
human as soon as it became an extension of the hand by serving
as a tool (and the stone in its turn humanised the hand of the
hominid). But once it is appropriated by a master, an employer,
a ministry of planning, a management, the tool's meaning is changed:
it deflects the action of its user towards other purposes. And
what is true of tools is true for all mediations.

Just as God was the supreme arbiter of grace, the magnetism of
the governing principle always draws to itself the largest possible
number of mediations. Power is the sum of alienated and alienating
mediations. Science (scientia theologiae ancilla) converted
the divine fraud into operational information, organised abstraction,
returning to the etymology of the word: ab-trahere, to
draw out of.

The energy which the individual expends in order to realise himself
and extend into the world according to his desires and dreams,
is suddenly braked, held up, shunted onto other tracks, recuperated.
What would normally be the phase of fulfilment is forced out of
the living world and kicked upstairs into the transcendental.

But the mechanism of abstraction is never completely loyal to
the principle of authority. However reduced man may be by his
stolen mediation, he can still enter the labyrinth of power with
Theseus' weapons of aggression and determination. if he finally
loses his way, it is because he has already lost his Ariadne,
snapped the sweet thread that links him with life: the desire
to be himself. For it is only in an unbroken relationship between
theory and lived praxis that there can be any hope of an end to
all dualities, the end of the power of man over man, and the beginning
of the era of totality.

Human energy does not let itself be led away into the inhuman
without a fight. The field of battle is always in the immediate
extension of lived experience, in spontaneous action. Not that
I am opposing abstract mediation in the name of some sort of wild,
'instinctive' spontaneity; that would merely be to reproduce on
a higher level the idiotic choice between pure speculation and
mindless activism, the disjunction between theory and practice.
I am saying that tactical adequacy involves launching the attack
at the very spot where the highwaymen of experience lay their
ambush, the spot where the attempt to act is transformed and perverted,
at the precise moment when spontaneous action is sucked up by
misinterpretation and misunderstanding. At this point there is
a momentary crystallization of consciousness which illumines both
the demands of the will-to-live and the fate that social organisation
has in store for them; living experience and its recuperation
by the machinery of authoritarianism. The point where resistance
begins is the look-out post of subjectivity. For identical reasons,
my knowledge of the world has no value except when I act to transform
it

2

The mediation of power works a permanent blackmail on the immediate.
of course, the idea that an act can't be carried through in the
totality of its implications faithfully reflects the reality of
a bankrupt world, a world of non-totality; but at the same time
it reinforces the metaphysical character of events, which is their
official falsification. Common sense is a compendium of slanders
like "We'll always need bosses", "Without authority
mankind would sink into barbarism and chaos" and so on. Custom
has mutilated man so thoroughly that when he mutilates himself
he thinks he is following a law of nature. And perhaps he is chained
so firmly to the pillory of submission through suppressing the
memory of what he has lost. Anyway, it benefits the slave mentality
to associate power with the only possible form of life, survival.
And it fits well with the master's purposes to encourage such
an idea.

In mankind's struggle for survival, hierarchical social organisation
was undeniably a decisive step forward. At one point in history,
the cohesion of a collectivity around its leader gave it the best,
perhaps the only chance of self-preservation. But the survival
was guaranteed at the price of a new alienation: the safeguard
was a prison, preserving life but preventing growth. Feudal regimes
reveal the contradiction bluntly: serfs, half men and half beasts,
existed side-by-side with a small priveleged sector, some of whom
strained after individual access to the exuberance and energy
of unrestrained living.

The feudal idea cared little about survival as such: famines,
plagues and massacres swept millions of beings from that best
of all possible worlds without unduly disturbing the generations
of literati and subtle hedonists. The bourgeoisie, on the other
hand, finds in survival the raw material of its economic interests.
The need to eat and subsist materially is bound to be good for
trade. Indeed it is not excessive to see in the primacy of the
economy, that dogma of bourgeois thought, the very source of its
celebrated humanism. If the bourgeoisie prefers man to God, it
is because only man produces and consumes, supplies and demands.
The divine universe, which is pre-economic, incurs their disapproval
almost as much as the post-economic world of the total man.

By force-feeding survival until it is satiated, consumer society
awakens a new appetite for life. Wherever survival and work are
both guaranteed, the old safeguards become obstacles. Not only
does the struggle to survive prevent us from really living; once
it becomes a struggle without real goals it begins to threaten
survival itself: what was ridiculous becomes precarious. Survival
has grown so fat that if it doesn't shed its skin it will choke
us all in it and die.

The protection provided by masters has lost its justification
since the mechanical solicitude of gadgets theoretically ended
the necessity for slaves. From now on, the ultima ratio
of the rulers is the deliberately maintained terror of a thermonuclear
apocalypse. Peaceful coexistence guarantees their existence. Power
no longer protects the people; it protects itself against the
people. Today, this inhumanity spontaneously created by men has
become simply the inhuman prohibition of all creation

3

Every time the total and immediate completion of an action is
deferred, power is confirmed in its function of grand mediator.
Spontaneous poetry, on the other hand, is anti-mediation par
excellence.

One could say schematically that bourgeois/Soviet fragmentary
power, which may be characterized as the sum of constraints, is
being absorbed gradually into a form of organisation based more
on alienating mediations. Ideological enchantment replaces the
bayonet. This perfected mode of government inevitably brings to
mind the prophets of cybernetics. Following the prudent directives
of the technocratic specialised left, the electronic Argus is
planning to eliminate the middlemen (spiritual leaders, putschist
generals, Franco-Stalinists and other sons of Ubu) and wire up
its Absolute State of well-being. But the more mediations are
alienated, the more the thirst for the immediate rages and the
savage poetry of revolutions tramples down frontiers.

In its final phase, authority will culminate in the union of abstract
and concrete. Power already abstracts, and the electric chair
is still neing used. The face of the world, lit up by power, is
organised according to a metaphysic of reality: and it's a sight
for sore eyes to see the faithful philosophers showing off their
new uniforms: technocrat, sociologist, specialist...

The pure form which is haunting society is recognisable as the
death of men. It is the neurosis which preceds necrosis, survival
sickness spreading slowly as living experience is replaced by
images, forms, objects, as alienated mediation transmutes experience
into a thing; madreporises it. It's a man or a tree or a stone...
as Lautréamont prophesied.

Gombrowicz at least gives due respect to Form, power's old go-between,
now promoted to the place of honour among pimps of State:

"You have never really been able to recognize or explain
the importance of Form in your life. Even in psychology you have
been unable to accord to Form its rightful place. We continue
to believe that it is feeling, purposes or ideas that govern our
behaviour, considering Form to be at most a harmless ornamental
addition. When the widow weeps tenderly beside her husband's coffin,
we think that she is crying because she feels her loss so keenly.
When some engineer, doctor or lawyer murders his wife, his children
or a friend, we suppose that he was driven to the deed by violent
or bloodthirsty impulses. When some politician expresses himself
vacuously, deceitfully or shabbily in a public speech, we say
that he is stupid because he expresses himself stupidly. But the
fact of the matter is this: a human being does not externalise
himself in an immediate manner, according to his nature, but always
through a definite Form; and this Form; and this Form, this way
of being, this way of speaking and reacting, does not issue solely
from himself but is imposed on him from outside.

"And so the same man can appear sometimes wise, sometimes
stupid, blood-thirsty or angelic, according to the Form which
affects him and according to the pressure of conditioning... When
will you consciously oppose the Forms? When will you stop identifying
with what defines you?"

4

In this Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx writes:

Theory becomes a material force once it has got hold of the masses.
Theory is capable of getting hold of men once it demonstrates
its truth with regard to man, once it becomes radical. To be radical
is to grasp something at its roots. But for man the root is man
himself

In short, radical theory gets hold of the masses because it comes
from them in the first place. It is the repository of spontaneous
creativity, and its job is to ensure the striking power of this
creativity. It is revolutionary technique at the service of poetry.
Any analysis of revolutions past or present that does not involve
a determination to resume the struggle more coherently and more
effectively plays fatally into the hands of the enemy: it is incorporated
into the dominant culture. The only time to talk about revolutionary
moments is when you are ready to live them at short notice. A
simple touchstone for testing the mettle of the clanking thinkers-errant
of the planet's left.

Those who are able to end a revolution are always the most eager
to explain it to those who have made it. The arguments they use
to explain it are as good as their arguments for ending it, one
can say that much. When theory escapes from the makers of a revolution
it turns against them. It no longer gets hold of them, it dominates
and conditions them. The theory developed by the strength of the
armed people now develops the strength of those who disarm the
people. leninism explains revolutions too -- it certainly taught
Makhno's partisans and the Kronstadt sailors a thing or two. An
ideology.

Whenever the powers-that-be get their hands on theory, it turns
into ideology: an argument ad hominem against man in general.
Radical theory comes out of the individual, being-as-subject:
it penetrates the masses through what is most creative in each
person, through subjectivity and the desire for realisation. Ideological
conditioning is quite the opposite: the technical management of
the inhuman, the weight of things. It turns men into objects which
have no meaning apart from the Order in which they have their
place. It assembles them in order to isolate them, making the
crowd into a multiplicity of solitudes.

Ideology is the falsehood of language and radical theory its truth.
The conflict between them, which is the conflict between man and
the inhumanity which he secretes, underlies the transformation
of the world into human realities as much as its transmutation
into metaphysical realities. Everything that men do and undo passes
through the mediation of language. Semantics is one of the principal
battlefields in the struggle between the will to live and the
spirit of submission

*

The fight is unfair. Words serve power better than they do men;
they serve it more faithfully than most men do, and more scrupulously
than the other mediations (space, time, technology...) Hypostatised
transcendence always depends on language and is developed in a
system of signs and symbols, such as words, dance, ritual, music,
sculpture and building. When a half-completed action, suddenly
obstructed, tries to continue in a form which it hopes will eventually
allow it to finish and realise itself -- like a generator transforming
mechanical energy into electrical energy which will be reconverted
into mechanical energy by a motor miles away -- at this moment
language swoops down on living experience, ties it hand and foot,
robs it of its substance, abstracts it. it always has categories
ready to condemn to incomprehensibility and nonsense anything
which they can't contain, or summon into existence-for-power that
which slumbers in nothingness because it has no place as yet in
the system of Order. The repetition of familiar signs is the basis
of ideology.

And yet men still try to use words and signs to perfect their
interrupted gestures. This is why a poetic language exists: a
language of lived experience which, for me, merges with radical
theory, the theory which penetrates the masses and becomes a material
force. Even when it is recuperated and turned against its original
purpose, poetry always gets what it wants in the end. The "Proletarians
of all lands, unite" which produced the Stalinist State will
one day realise the classless society. No poetic sign is ever
completely tamed by ideology.

The language that diverts radical actions, creative actions, human
actions par excellence, from their realisation, becomes
anti-poetry. it defines the linguistics of power: its science
of information. This information is the model of false communication,
the communication of the inauthentic, the non-living. There is
a principle that I find holds good: as soon as a language no longer
obeys the desire for realisation, it falsifies communication;
it no longer communicates anything except that false promise of
truth which is called a lie. But this lie is the truth of what
destroys me, infects me with its virus of submission. Signs are
thus the vanishing points from which diverge the antagonistic
perspectives which make up the world and divide it between them:
the perspective of power and the perspective of the will to live.
Each word, idea or symbol is a double agent. Some, like the word
'fatherland' or the policeman's uniform, usually work for authority;
but make no mistake, when ideologies clash or begin to wear out
the most mercenary sign can become a good anarchist (I am thinking
of the splendid title that Bellegarigue chose for his paper: L'Anarchie,
Journal de l'Ordre).

Dominant semiological systems -- which are those of the dominant
castes -- have only mercenary signs, and, as Humpty-Dumpty says,
the king pays double time to words he uses a lot. But deep down
inside, every mercenary has dreams of killing the king. If we
are condemned to a diet of lies we must learn to spike them with
a drop of the acid truth. This is the way the agitator works:
he charges his words and signs so powerfully with living reality
that all the others are pulled out of place. He diverts
them.

In a general way, the fight for language is the fight for the
freedom to live, for the reversal of perspective. The battle is
between metaphysical facts and the reality of facts: I mean between
facts conceived statistically as part of a system of interpretation
of the world and facts understood in their development by the
praxis which transforms them.

Power can't be overthrown like a government. The united front
against authority covers the whole extent of everyday life and
engages the vast majority of men. To know how to live is to know
how to fight against renunciation without ever giving an inch.
Let nobody underestimate power's skill in stuffing its slaves
with words to the point of making them the slaves of its words.

What weapons do we have to secure our freedom? We can mention
three:

1. Information should be corrected in the direction of poetry,
news deciphered, official terms translated (so that "society",
in the perspective opposed to power, becomes "racket"
or "area of hierarchical power") -- leading eventually
to a glossary or encyclopaedia (Diderot was well aware of their
importance and so are the Situationists).

2. Open dialogue, the language of dialectic; conversation, and
all forms of non-spectacular discussion

3. What Jakob Boehme called "sensual speech" (sensualische
Sprache) "because it is a clear mirror of the senses".
And the author of the Way to God elaborates: "in sensual
speech all spirits converse directly, and have no need of any
language, because theirs is the language of nature." if you
remember what I have called the recreation of nature, the language
Boehme talks about clearly becomes the language of spontaneity,
of "doind", of individual and collective poetry; language
centred on realisation, leading lived experience out of the cave
of history. This is also connected with what Paul Brousse and
Ravachol understood by "propoganda of the deed"

*

There is a silent communication; it is well known to lovers. At
this stage language seems to lose its importance as essential
mediation, thought is no longer a distraction (in the sense of
leading us away from ourselves), words and signs become a luxury,
an exuberance. think of those bantering conversations with their
baroque of cries and caresses which are so surprisingly ridiculous
for those who do not share the lovers' intoxication. but it was
also direct communication that Léhautier referred to when
the judge asked him what anarchists he knew in Paris: :Anarchists
don't need to know one another to think the same thing."
In radical groups which are able to reach the highest level of
theoretical and practical coherence, words will sometimes acquire
this privelege of playing and making love: erotic communication.

An aside: history has often been accused of happening back-to-front;
the question of language becoming superfluous and turning into
language-game is another example. A baroque current runs through
the history of thought, making fun of words and signs with the
subversive intention of disturbing the semiological order and
Order in general. But the series of attempts on the life of language
by the rabble of tumbloing nonsense-rhymers whose prize fools
were Lear and Carroll finds its true expression in the Dada explosion.
In 1916, the desire to have it out with signs, thoughts and words
corresponded for the first time to a real crisis of communication.
The liquidation of language that had so often been undertaken
speculatively had a chance to find its historical realisation
at last.

In an epoch which still had all its transcendental faith inlanguage,
and in God, the master of all transcendence, doubts about signs
could only lead to terrorist activity. When the crisis of human
relationships shattered the unitary web of mythical communication,
the attack on language took on a revolutionary air. So much so
that it is tempting to say, as Hegel might have, that the decomposition
of language chose Dada as the medium through which to reveal itself
to the minds of men. Under the unitary regime the same desire
to play with signs had been betrayed by history and found no response.
By exposing falsified communication Dada began to supersede language
in the direction of poetry. Today the language of myth and the
language of spectacle are giving way to the reality which underlies
them: the language of deeds. This language contains in itself
the critique of all modes of expression and is thus a continuous
auto-critique. Poor little sub-dadaists! Because they haven't
understood that Dada necessarily implies this supersession, they
continue to mumble that we talk like deaf men. Which is one way
to be a fat maggot in the spectacle of cultural decomposition

*

The language of the whole man will be a whole language: perhaps
the end of the old language of words. Inventing this language
means reconstructing man right down to his unconscious. Totality
is hacking its way through the fractured non-totality of thoughts,
words and actions towards itself. We will have to speak until
we can do without words.

Chapters 12 to 18 are from the translation
by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Left Bank Books/Rebel Press, 1983.
No copyright claims will be made against publishers of nonprofit
editions. [Published in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, #34.
Additional edits and translations by a.h.s. boy, 1994]

---------------------------------------------------

Chapter 12

The impossibility of realization: Power as sum of seductions

Where constraint breaks people, and mediation makes
fools of them, the seduction of power is what makes them love
their oppression. Because of it people give up their real riches:
(a) for a cause that mutilates them [chapter twelve], (b) for
an imaginary unity that fragments them [chapter thirteen], (c)
for an appearance that reifies them [chapter fourteen], (d) for
roles that wrest them from authentic life [chapter fifteen], (e)
for a time whose passage defines and confines them [chapter sixteen].

SACRIFICE

There is such a thing as a reformism of sacrifice that is really
a sacrifice to reformism. Humanistic self-mortification and fascistic
self-destruction both leave us nothing--not even the option of
death. All causes are equally inhuman. But the will to live raises
its voice against this epidemic of masochism, wherever there is
the slightest pretext for revolt; for what appear to be merely
partial demands actually conceal the process whereby a revolution
is being prepared: the nameless revolution, the revolution of
everyday life (1). The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to
be bartered: human beings are not exchangeable. Henceforward the
appeal to voluntary self-sacrifice is going to have to rely on
three strategies only: on art, on "great human values,"
and on the present (2).

Where people are not broken--and broken in--by force and fraud,
they are seduced. What are Power's methods of seduction? Internalized
constraints which ensure a good conscience based on a lie: the
masochism of the honnête homme. Thus Power castrates but
calls castration self-denial; it offers a choice of servitudes
but calls this choice liberty. The feeling of having done one's
duty is Power's reward for self-immolation with honor.

As I showed in "Banalités de base" (Internationale
Situationiste, issues 7-8; English version: "The Totality
for Kids"), the master-slave dialectic implies that the mythic
sacrifice of the master embodies within itself the real sacrifice
of the slave: the master makes a spiritual sacrifice of his real
power to the general interest, while the slave makes a material
sacrifice of his real life to a power which he shares in appearance
only. The framework of generalized appearances or, if you will,
the essential lie required for the development of privative appropriation
(i.e., the appropriation of things by means of the appropriation
of beings) is an intrinsic aspect of the dialectic of sacrifice,
and the root of the infamous separation that this involves. The
mistake of the philosophers was that they built an ontology and
the notion of an unchanging human nature on the basis of a mere
social accident, a purely contingent necessity. History has been
seeking to eliminate privative appropriation ever since the conditions
which called for it ceased to exist. But the metaphysical maintenance
of the philosophers' error continues to work to the advantage
of the masters, of the 'eternal' ruling minority.

* * *

The decline and fall of sacrifice parallels the decline and fall
of myth. Bourgeois thought exposes the materiality of myth, deconsecrating
and fragmenting it. lt does not abolish it, however, because if
it did the bourgeoisie would cease to exploit--and hence to exist.
The fragmentary spectacle is simply one phase in the decomposition
of myth, a process today being accelerated by the dictates of
consumption. Similarly, the old sacrifice-gift ordained by cosmic
forces has shrivelled into a sacrifice-exchange minutely metered
in terms of social security and social-democratic justice. And
sacrifice attracts fewer and fewer devotees, just as fewer and
fewer people are seduced by the miserable show put on by ideologies.
The fact is that today's tiny masturbations are a feeble replacement
indeed for the orgastic heights offered by eternal salvation.
Hoping for promotion is a far cry from hoping--albeit insanely--for
life everlasting. Our only gods are heroes of the fatherland,
heroes of the shop floor, heroes of the frigidaire, heroes of
fragmented thought...How are the mighty fallen!

Nevertheless. The knowledge that an ill's end is in sight is cold
comfort when you still have to suffer it in the immediate. And
the praises of sacrifice are still sung on every side. The air
is filled with the sermonizing of red priests and ecumenical bureaucrats.
Vodka mixed with holy water. Instead of a knife between our teeth
we have the drool of Jesus Christ on our lips. Sacrifice yourselves
joyfully, brothers and sisters! For the Cause, for the Established
Order, for the Party, for Unity, for Meat and Potatoes!

The old socialists used to like saying, "They say we are
dying for our country, but really we are dying for Capital."
Nowadays their bureaucratic heirs are berated in similar terms:
"You think you're fighting for the proletariat, but really
you die for your leaders." "We are not building for
the future; men and steel are the same thing in the eyes of the
five-year-plan." And yet, what do young leftist radicals
do after stating these obvious truths? They enter the service
of a Cause--the 'best' of all Causes. The time they have for creative
activity they squander handing out leaflets, putting up posters,
demonstrating or heckling local politicians. They become militants,
fetishizing action because others are doing their thinking for
them. Sacrifice seems to have an endless series of tricks up its
sleeve.

The best cause is one in which the individual can lose himself
body and soul. The principle of death is simply the denial of
the principle of the will to live. One or other of these principles
must win out, however. There is no middle ground, no possibility
of compromise between them on the level of consciousness. And
you have to fight for one or for the other. Fanatics of established
orders--Chouans, Nazis, Carlists--display their unequivocal choice
of the party of death with absolute consistency. The fascist slogan
Viva la Muerte! must at least be given credit for pulling no punches.
By contrast, our reformists of death in small doses and socialists
of ennui cannot even claim the dubious honor of having an aesthetic
of total destruction. All they can do is mitigate the passion
for life, stunting it to the point where it turns against itself
and changes into a passion for destruction and self-destruction.
They oppose concentration camps, but only in the name of moderation--in
the name of moderate power and moderate death.

Great despisers of life that they are, the partisans of absolute
self-sacrifice to State, Cause or Fuhrer do have one thing in
common with those whose passion for life challenges the ethos
and techniques of renunciation. Though antagonistic, their respective
perceptions of revelry are equally sharp. Life being so Dionysian
in its essence, it is as though the partisans of death, their
lives twisted by their monstrous asceticism, manage to distill
all the joy that has been lost to them into the precise moment
of their death. Spartan legions, mercenaries, fanatics, suicide
squads--all experience an instant of bliss as they die.

But this is a fuîte macabre, frozen, aestheticized, caught
for eternity in a camera flash. The paratroopers that Bigeard
speaks of leave this world through the portal of aesthetics: they
are petrified figures, madrepores--conscious, perhaps, of their
ultimate hysteria. For aesthetics is carnival paralyzed, as cut
off from life as a Jibaro head, the carnival of death. The aesthetic
element, the element of pose, corresponds to the element of death
secreted by everyday life. Every apocalypse is beautiful, but
this beauty is a dead one. Remember the song of the Swiss Guard
that C? taught us to love.

The end of the Commune was no apocalypse. The difference between
the Nazis dreaming of bringing the world down with them and the
Communards setting Paris on fire is the difference between total
death brutally affirmed and total life brutally denied. The Nazis
merely operated the mechanism of logical annihilation already
designed by humanists preaching submission and abnegation. The
Communards knew that a life constructed with passion cannot be
taken away; that there is more pleasure in destroying such a life
than in seeing it mutilated; and that it is better to go up in
flames with a glad heart than to give an inch, when giving an
inch is the same as giving up all along the line. "Better
die on our feet than live on our knees!" Despite its repulsive
source--the lips of the Stalinist Ibarruri--it seems to me that
this cry eloquently expresses the legitimacy of a particular form
of suicide, a good way of taking leave. And what was valid for
the Communards holds good for individuals today.

Let us have no more suicides from weariness, which come like a
final sacrifice crowning all those that have gone before. Better
one last laugh, à la Cravan, or one last song, à
la Ravachol.

* * *

The moment revolution calls for self-sacrifice it ceases to exist.
The individual cannot give himself up for a revolution, only for
a fetish. Revolutionary moments are carnivals in which the individual
life celebrates its unification with a regenerated society. The
call for sacrifice in such a context is a funeral knell. Jules
Vallée fell short of his own train of thought when he wrote:
"If the submissive do not outlive the rebellious, one might
as well rebel in the name of an idea." For a militant can
only be a revolutionary in spite of the ideas which he agrees
to serve. The real Vallée, the Communard Vallée,
is first the child, then the student, making up in one long Sunday
for all the endless weeks that have gone before. Ideology is the
rebel's tombstone, its purpose being to prevent his coming back
to life.

When the rebel begins to believe that he is fighting for a higher
good, the authoritarian principle gets a fillip. Humanity has
never been short of justifications for giving up what is human.
ln fact some people possess a veritable reflex of submission,
an irrational terror of freedom; this masochism is everywhere
visible in everyday life. With what agonizing facility we can
give up a wish, a passion, stemming from the most essential part
of ourselves. With what passivity, what inertia, we can accept
living or acting for some thing--'thing' being the operative word,
a word whose dead weight always seems to carry the day. lt is
hard to be oneself, so we give up as quickly as possible, seizing
whatever pretext offers itself: love of children, of reading,
of artichokes, etc, etc. Such is the abstract generality of the
ill that our desire for a cure tends to evaporate.

And yet, the reflex of freedom also knows how to exploit a pretext.
Thus a strike for higher wages or a rowdy demonstration can awaken
the carnival spirit. As I write thousands of workers around the
world are downing tools or picking up guns, ostensibly in obedience
to directives or principles, but actually, at the profoundest
level, in response to their passionate desire to change their
lives. The real demand of all insurrectionary movements is the
transformation of the world and the reinvention of life. This
is not a demand formulated by theorists: rather, it is the basis
of poetic creation. Revolution is made everyday despite, and in
opposition to, the specialists of revolution. This revolution
is nameless, like everything springing from lived experience.
Its explosive coherence is being forged constantly in the everyday
clandestinity of acts and dreams.

No other problem is as important to me as a difficulty I encounter
throughout the long daylight hours: how can I invent a passion,
fulfill a wish or construct a dream in the daytime in the way
my mind does spontaneously as I sleep? What haunts me are my unfinished
actions, not the future of the human race or the state of the
world in the year 2000. I could not care less about hypothetical
possibilities, and the meandering abstractions of the futurologists
leave me cold. If I write, it is not, as they say, "for others."
I have no wish to exorcise other people's ghosts. I string words
together as a way of getting out of the well of isolation, because
I need others to pull me out. I write out of impatience, and with
impatience. I want to live without dead time. What other people
say interests me only in as much as it concerns me directly. They
must use me to save themselves just as I use them to save myself.
We have a common project. But it is out of the question that the
project of the whole man should entail a reduction in individuality.
There are no degrees in castration. The apolitical violence of
the young, and its contempt for the interchangeable goods displayed
in the supermarkets of culture, art and ideology, are a concrete
confirmation of the fact that the individual's self-realization
depends on the application of the principle of "every man
for himself," though this has to be understood in collective
terms--and above all in radical terms.

At that stage in a piece of writing where people used to look
for explanations, I would like them from now on to find a settling
of scores.

2

The refusal of sacrifice is the refusal to be bartered. There
is nothing in the world of things, exchangeable for money or not,
which can be treated as equivalent to a human being. The individual
is irreducible. He is subject to change but not to exchange. Now,
the most superficial examination of movements for social reform
shows that they have never demanded anything more than a cleaning-up
of exchange and sacrifice, making it a point of honor to humanize
inhumanity and make it attractive. And every time slaves try to
make their slavery more bearable they are striking a blow for
their masters.

The "road to socialism" consists in this: as people
become more and more tightly shackled by the sordid relations
of reification, the tendency of the humanitarians to mutilate
people in an egalitarian fashion grows ever more insistent. And
with the deepening crisis of the virtues of self-abnegation and
of devotion generating a tendency towards radical refusal, the
sociologists, those watchdogs of modern society, have been called
in to peddle a subtler form of sacrifice: art.

* * *

The great religions succeeded in turning people's wretched earthly
existence into a time of voluptuous expectation: at the end of
this valley of tears lay life eternal in God. According to the
bourgeois conception, art is better equipped than God to bestow
eternal glory on people. The art-in-life-and-in-God of unitary
social systems (Egyptian statuary, African art, etc.) gave way
to an art which complemented life and sought to make up for the
absence of God (fourth-century Greece, Horace, Ronsard, Malherbe,
the Romantics, etc.). The builders of cathedrals cared as little
for posterity as did de Sade. Their salvation was guaranteed by
God, as de Sade's was guaranteed by himself: neither sought a
place in the museum of history. They worked for a supreme state
of being, not for the temporal survival of their work or for the
admiration of centuries to come.

History is the earthly paradise of the bourgeois idea of transcendence.
This realm is accessible not through commodities but through apparent
gratuity: through the sacrifice called for by the work of art,
through activity seemingly undetermined by the immediate need
to increase capital. The philanthropist does good works; the patriot
produces heroism; the soldier fashions victory; the poet or scholar
creates works of literary or scientific value, and so on. But
there is an ambiguity in the very idea of "making a work
of art," for it embraces both the lived experience of the
artist and the sacrifice of this experience to the abstraction
of a creative substance, i.e., to the aesthetic form. The artist
relinquishes the lived intensity of the creative moment in exchange
for the durability of what he creates, so that his name may live
on in the funereal glory of the museum. And his desire to produce
a durable work is the very thing that prevents him from living
imperishable instants of real life.

Actually, if we except academicism, artists never succumb completely
to aesthetic assimilation. Though he may abdicate his immediate
experience for the sake of appearances, any artist--and anyone
who tries to live is an artist--must also follow his desire to
increase his share of dreams in the objective world of others.
ln this sense he entrusts the thing he creates with the mission
of completing his personal self-realization within the collectivity.
And in this sense creativity is revolutionary in its essence.

The spectacle, in ideology, art and culture, turns the wolves
of spontaneity into the sheepdogs of knowledge and beauty. Literary
anthologies are replete with insurrectionary writings, the museums
with calls to arms. But history does such a good job of pickling
them in perpetuity that we can neither see nor hear them. ln this
area, however, consumer society performs a salutary task of dissolution.
For today art can only construct plastic cathedrals. The dictatorship
of consumption ensures that every aesthetic collapses before it
can produce any masterpieces. Premature burial is an axiom of
consumerism, imperfection a precondition of planned obsolescence.
Sensational aesthetic departures occur only because someone briefly
finds a way to outdo the spectacle of artistic decomposition in
its own terms. And any such originality soon turns up mass-marketed
in every five-and-dime. Bernard Buffet, pop art, Andy Warhol,
rock music--where are you now? To talk of a modern work of art
enduring is sillier than talking of the eternal values of Standard
Oil.

As for the progressive sociologists, once they had finished shaking
their heads sadly over the discovery that the value of the art
object had become nothing but its market price, and that the artists
were working according to the norms of profitability, they decided
that we should return to the source of art, to everyday life--not
in order to change it, of course, for such is not their function,
but rather to make it the raw material for a new aesthetic which
would defy packaging techniques and so remain independent of buying
and selling. As though there were no such thing as consuming on
the spot! The result? Sociodramas and happenings which supposedly
provoke spontaneous participation on the part of the spectators.
The only thing the spectators participate in, though, is an aesthetic
of nothingness. The only thing that can be expressed in the mode
of the spectacle is the emptiness of everyday life. And indeed,
what better commodity than an aesthetic of emptiness? The accelerating
decomposition of values has itself become the only available form
of entertainment. The trick is that the spectators of the cultural
and ideological vacuum are here enlisted as its organizers. The
spectacle's inanity is made up for by forcing its spectators --passive
agents par excellence--to participate in it. The ultimate logic
of the happening and its derivatives is to supply the society
of masterless slaves, which the cyberneticians have planned for
us, with the spectatorless spectacle it will require. For artists
in the strict sense of the word, the road to complete assimilation
is well posted: they have merely to follow the progressive sociologists
and their ilk into the super-corporation of specialists. They
may rest assured that Power will reward them well for applying
their talents to the job of dressing up the old conditioning to
passivity in bright new colors.

From the perspective of Power, everyday life is a latticework
of renunciations and mediocrity. A true void. An aesthetic of
daily life would make us all into artists responsible for organizing
this nothingness. The final ploy of official art will be the attempt
to lend therapeutic features to what Freud, in a dubious simplification,
referred to as the death instinct--i.e., rapturous submission
to authority.

Wherever the will to live fails to spring spontaneously from individual
poetry, there falls the shadow of the crucified Toad of Nazareth.
The artist in every human being can never be brought out by regression
to artistic forms defined by the spirit of sacrifice. We have
to go back to square one.

* * *

The surrealists--or some of them at any rate--understood that
the only valid transcendence of art lay in direct experience,
in works that no ideology could assimilate into its internally
consistent lie. They came to grief, of course, precisely because
of their complaisant attitude towards the cultural spectacle.
Admittedly, the current process of decomposition of thought and
art has made the danger of aesthetic assimilation much less than
it was in the thirties. The present state of affairs tends to
favor situationist agitation.

Much mournful wailing has gone on--since surrealism's demise,
in fact--over the disappearance of idyllic relationships such
as friendship, love and hospitality. But make no mistake: all
this nostalgia for the more human virtues of the past answers
to one thing and one thing only, namely, the impending need to
revive the idea of sacrifice, which has been coming under too
heavy fire. The fact is that there will never be any friendship,
or love, or hospitality, or solidarity, so long as self-abnegation
exists. The call for self-denial always amounts to an attempt
to make inhumanity attractive. Here is an anecdote of Brecht's
that makes the point perfectly. To illustrate the proper way of
doing a service for friends, and to entertain his listeners, Herr
K tells a story. Three young people once came to an old Arab and
said: "Our father is dead. He left us seventeen camels, but
he laid down in his will that the eldest son should have a half,
the second son a third, and the youngest a ninth part of his possessions.
Try as we will, we cannot agree on how to divide up the camels.
So we'd like to leave it up to you to decide." The old man
thought it over before replying: "l see that you need another
camel before you can share them out properly. Take mine. lt's
the only one I have but it's at your disposal. Take it, divide
the beasts up, and bring me back whatever you have left over."
The young men thanked him for his friendly offer, took his camel
and divided up the eighteen animals as follows: the eldest took
a half, which was nine camels, the second son took a third, which
was six, and the youngest took his ninth, which was two. To everyone's
surprise there was still one camel remaining, and this they promptly
returned with renewed thanks to their old friend. According to
Herr K, this was the perfect example of the correct way to do
a friend a service because nobody had to make a sacrifice. Here
is a model which should be made axiomatic and strictly applied
to all of everyday life.

lt is not a question of opting for the art of sacrifice as opposed
to the sacrifice of art, but rather of putting an end to sacrifice
as art. The triumph of an authentic savoir-vivre and of the construction
of authentically lived situations exists everywhere as a potentiality,
but everywhere these tendencies are distorted by the falsification
of what is human.

* * *

Chapter 13

SEPARATION

Privative appropriation, the basis of social organization,
keeps individuals separated from themselves and from others. Artificial
unitary paradises seek to conceal this separation by assimilating,
more or less successfully, people's prematurely shattered dreams
of unity. To no avail. People may be forced to swing back and
forth across the narrow gap between the pleasure of creating and
the pleasure of destroying, but this very oscillation suffices
to bring Power to its knees.

People live separated from one another, separated from what they
are in others, and separated from themselves. The history of humanity
is the history of one basic separation which precipitates and
determines all the others: the social distinction between masters
and slaves. By means of history men try to find one another and
attain unity. The class struggle is but one stage, though a decisive
one, in the struggle for the whole man.

Just as the ruling class has every reason in the world to deny
the existence of the class struggle, so the history of separation
is necessarily indistinguishable from the history of the dissimulation
of separation. This mystification results less from a deliberate
intent than from a long drawn out and confused battle in which
the desire for unity has generally ended up being transformed
into its opposite. Wherever separation is not totally eliminated
it is reinforced. When the bourgeoisie came to power, fresh light
was shed on the factors which divide men in this most essential
way, for bourgeois revolution laid bare the social and material
character of separation.

* * *

What is God? The guarantor and quintessence of the myth used to
justify the domination of man by man. This repellent invention
has no other raison d'être. As myth decomposes and passes
into the stage of the spectacle, the Grand External Object, as
Lautréamont called him, is shattered by the forces of social
atomization and degenerates into a remedy for intimate use only--a
sort of salve for social diseases.

At the high point of the crisis brought on by the end of classical
philosophy and of the ancient world, Christianity's genius lay
in the fact that it subordinated the recasting of a mythic system
to one fundamental principle: the doctrine of the Trinity. What
does this dogma of the Three in One, which caused so much ink
and blood to flow, really mean?

Man belongs to God in his soul, to the temporal authority in his
body, and to himself in his spirit. His salvation depends on his
soul, his liberty on his spirit, his earthly existence on his
body. The soul envelops the body and the spirit, and without the
soul these are as nothing. If we look more closely at this schema,
we find an analogy for the union of master and slave under the
principle of man envisaged as a divine creature. The slave is
the body, the labor power appropriated by the lord; the master
is his spirit which governs the body and invests it with a small
part of its higher essence. The slave sacrifices himself in body
to the power of the master, while the master sacrifices himself
in spirit to the community of his slaves (e.g., the king 'serving'
his people, de Gaulle 'serving' France, the Pope washing the feet
of the poor). The slave abdicates his earthly life in exchange
for the feeling of being free, that is, for the spirit of the
master come down into him. Consciousness mystified is mythic consciousness.
The master makes a notional gift of his master's power to all
those whom he governs. By drenching the alienation of bodies in
the subtler alienation of the spirit, he economizes on the amount
of violence needed to maintain slavery. The slave identifies in
spirit, or at least he may, with the master to whom he gives up
his life force. But whom can the master identify with! Not with
his slaves qua possessions, qua bodies, certainly: rather, with
his slaves qua emanation of the spirit of mastery itself, of the
master supreme. Since the individual master must sacrifice himself
on the spiritual plane, he has to find someone or something within
the coherent mythic system to make this sacrifice to: this need
is met by a notion of mastery-in-itself of which he partakes and
to which he submits. The historically contingent class of masters
had thus to create a God to bow down to spiritually and with whom
to identify. God validated both the master's mythic sacrifice
to the public good and the slave's real sacrifice to the master's
private and privative power. God is the principle of all submission,
the night which makes all crimes lawful. The only illegal crime
is the refusal to accept a master. God is a harmony of lies, an
ideal form uniting the slave's voluntary sacrifice (Christ), the
consenting sacrifice of the master (the Father; the slave as the
master's son), and the indissoluble link between them (the Holy
Ghost). The same model underlies the ideal picture of man as a
divine, whole and mythic creature: a body subordinated to a guiding
spirit working for the greater glory of the soul--the soul being
the all embracing synthesis.

We thus have a type of relationship in which two terms take their
meaning from an absolute principle, from an obscure and inaccessible
norm of unchallengeable transcendence (God, blood, holiness, grace,
etc.). Innumerable dualities of this type were kept bubbling for
century after century like a good stew on the fire of mythic unity.
Then the bourgeoisie took the pot off the fire and was left with
nothing but a vague nostalgia for the warmth of the unitary myth
and a set of cold and flavorless abstractions: body and spirit,
being and consciousness, individual and society, private and public,
general and particular, etc., etc. Ironically, though moved by
class interests, the bourgeoisie destroyed the unitary myth and
its tripartite structure to its own detriment. The wish for unity,
so effectively fobbed off by the mythic thinking of unitary regimes,
did not disappear along with those regimes: on the contrary, the
wish became all the more urgent as the material nature of separation
became clearer and clearer to people's consciousness. By laying
bare the economic and social foundations of separation, the bourgeoisie
supplied the arms which will serve to end separation once and
for all. And the end of separation means the end of the bourgeoisie
and of all hierarchical power. This is why no ruling class or
caste can effect the transformation of feudal unity into real
unity, into true social participation. This mission can only be
accomplished by the new proletariat, which must forcibly wrest
the third force (spontaneous creation, poetry) from the gods,
and keep it alive in the everyday life of all. The transient period
of fragmentary power will then be seen in its true light as a
mere moment of insomnia, as the vanishing point prerequisite to
the reversal of perspective, as the step back preparatory to the
leap of transcendence.

* * *

History testifies to the struggle waged against the unitary principle
and to the ways in which a dualistic reality began to emerge.
The challenge was voiced to begin with in a theological language,
the official language of myth. Later the idiom became that of
ideology, the idiom of the spectacle. In their preoccupations,
the Manichaeans, the Cathari, the Hussites, the Calvinists, etc,
have much in common with such figures as Jean de Meung, La Boème
or Vanino Vanini. We find Descartes desperately locating the soul,
for want of any better place, in the pineal gland. The Cartesian
God is a funambulist balancing for some perfectly unaccountable
reason atop a perfectly intelligible world. Pascal's, by contrast,
hides himself from view, so depriving man and the world of a justification
without which they are left in meaningless confrontation, each
being the only criterion for judging the other: how can something
be measured against nothing?

By the close of the eighteenth century the fabric was rending
in all directions as the process of decomposition began to speed
up. This was the beginning of the era of "little men"
in competition. Fragments of human beings claimed the status of
absolutes: matter, mind, consciousness, action, universal, particular--
what God could put this Humpty Dumpty together again?

The spirit of feudal lordship had found an adequate justification
in a certain transcendence. But a capitalist God is an absurdity.
Whereas lordship called for a trinitarian system, capitalist exploitation
is dualistic. Moreover, it cannot be dissociated from the material
nature of economic relationships. The economic realm is no mystery:
the nearest things to miracles here are the element of chance
in the functioning of the market and the perfect programming of
computerized planning. Calvin's rational God is much less attractive
than the loans with interest that Calvinism authorizes so readily.
As for the God of the Anabaptists of Munster and of the revolutionary
peasant of 1525, he is a primitive expression of the irrepressible
thrust of the masses towards a society of whole men.

The mystical authority of the feudal lord was very different from
that instituted by the bourgeoisie. For the lord did not simply
change his role and become a factory boss: once the mysterious
superiority of blood and lineage is abolished, nothing is left
but a mechanics of exploitation and a race for profit which have
no justification but themselves. Boss and worker are separated
not by any qualitative distinction of birth but merely by quantitative
distinctions of money and power. Indeed, what makes capitalist
exploitation so repulsive is the fact that it occurs between 'equals'.
All the same, the bourgeoisie's work of destruction--though quite
unintentional-ly, of course--reveals the justification for even
revolution. When peoples stop being fooled they stop doing what
they are told.

* * *

Fragmentary power carries fragmentation to the point where the
human beings over which it holds sway themselves become contradictory.
At the same time the unitary lie breaks down. The death of God
democratizes the consciousness of separation. What was the "Romantic
agony" if not a response to the pain of this split? Today
we see it in every aspect of life: in love, in the human gaze,
in nature, in our dreams, in reality. Hegel spoke of the tragedy
of consciousness; he would have been nearer the mark had he spoken
of a consciousness of tragedy. We find such a consciousness in
revolutionary form in Marx. A far more comforting picture, from
the viewpoint of Power, is offered by Peter Schlemiel setting
off in search of his own shadow so as to forget that he is really
a shadow in search of a body. The bourgeoisie's invention of artificial
unitary paradises is a self-defensive reflex which is more or
less successful in retrieving the old enchantment and reviving
prematurely shattered dreams of unity.

Thus in addition to the great collective onanisms--ideologies,
illusions of social unity, herd mentalities, opiums of the people--we
are offered a whole range of marginal solutions lying in the no-man's-land
between the permissible and the forbidden: individualized ideology,
obsession, monomania, unique (and hence alienating) passions,
drugs and other highs (alcohol, the cult of speed and rapid change,
of rarefied sensations, etc). Now all these pursuits allow us
to lose ourselves completely while preserving the impression of
self-realization, but the corrosiveness of such activities stems
above all from their partial quality. The passion for play is
no longer alienating wherever the person who gives himself up
to it seeks play in the whole of life--in love, in thought, in
the construction of situations. ln the same way the wish to kill
is no longer megalomania if it is combined with revolutionary
consciousness.

Unitary palliatives thus entail two risks for Power. ln the first
place they fail to satisfy, and in the second they tend to foster
the will to build a real social unity. Mystical elevation led
only to God; by contrast, horizontal historical progression towards
a dubious spectacular unity is infinitely finite. It creates an
unlimited appetite for the absolute, yet its quantitative nature
is limiting by definition. Its mad rush, therefore, must sooner
or later debouch into the qualitative, whether in a negative way
or-- should a revolutionary consciousness prevail--through the
transformation of negativity into positivity. The negative road
does not lead to self-realization: it precipitates us into a willful
self-destruction. Madness deliberately sought, the voluptuousness
of crime and cruelty, the convulsive lightning of perversity--these
are the enticing paths open to such unrepentant self-annihilation.
To take them is merely to respond with unusual enthusiasm to the
gravitational pull of Power's own tendency to dismember and destroy.
But if it is to last, Power has to shackle its destructiveness:
the good general oppresses his men, he does not execute them.
On the other hand, it remains to be seen whether nothingness can
be successfully doled out drop by drop. The limited pleasures
derived from self-destruction could end up bringing down the power
which sets such limits to pleasure. We only have to look at Stockholm
or Watts to see that negative pleasure is forever on the point
of tipping over into total pleasure--a little shove, and negative
violence releases its positivity. I believe that all pleasure
embodies the search for total, unitary satisfaction, in every
sphere--a fact which I doubt Huysmans had the humor to see when
he solemnly described a man with an erection as 'insurgent'.

The complete unchaining of pleasure is the surest way to the revolution
of everyday life, to the construction of the whole man.

Chapter 14

THE ORGANIZATION OF APPEARANCES

1

The organization of appearances is a system for protecting
the facts. A racket. lt represents the facts in a mediated reality
to prevent them emerging in unmediated form. Unitary power organized
appearances as myth. Fragmentary power organizes appearances as
spectacle. Challenged, the coherence of myth became the myth of
coherence. Magnified by history, the incoherence of the spectacle
turns into the spectacle of incoherence (eg, pop art, a contemporary
form of consumable putrefaction, is also an expression of the
contemporary putrefaction of consumption) (1). The poverty of
'the drama' as a literary genre goes hand in hand with the colonization
of social space by theatrical attitudes. Enfeebled on the stage,
theatre battens on to everyday life and attempts to dramatize
everyday behaviour. Lived experience is poured into the moulds
of roles. The job of perfecting roles has been turned over to
experts (2).

The ideal world," says Nietzsche, "is a lie invented
to deprive reality of its value, its meaning, its truth. Until
now the ideal has been the curse of reality. This lie has so pervaded
humanity that it has been perverted and has falsified itself even
in its deepest instincts, even to the point where it bows down
to values directly opposed to those which formerly ensured progress
by ensuring the self-transformation of the present." The
lie of the ideal is of course merely the truth of the masters.
When theft needs legal justification, when authority raises the
banner of the general interest while pursuing private ends with
impunity, is it any wonder that the lie fascinates the minds of
men, twisting them to fit its laws until their contortions come
to resemble 'natural' human postures? And it is true that man
lies because in a world governed by lies he cannot do otherwise:
he is falsehood himself, he is trapped in his own falsehood. Common
sense never underwrites anything except the decree promulgated
in the name of everyone against the truth. Common sense is the
lie put into lay terms.

All the same, nobody lies groaning under the yoke of inauthenticity
twenty-four hours a day. There are always a few radical thinkers
in whom a truthful light shines briefly through the lie of words;
and by the same token there are very few alienations which are
not shattered every day for an instant, for an hour, for the space
of a dream, by subjective refusal. Words are never completely
in the thrall of Power, and no one is ever completely unaware
of what is destroying him. When these moments of truth are extended
they will turn out to have been the tip of the iceberg of subjectivity
destined to sink the Titanic of the lie.

* * *

After shattering myth, the tide of materialism has washed its
fragments out to sea. Once the motor force of this tide, the bourgeoisie
will end up as so much foam drifting out along with all the flotsam.
When he describes the mechanism whereby the king's hired assassin
returns in due time to carry out his orders upon the one who gave
them, Shakespeare seems to offer us a curiously prophetic account
of the fate reserved for the class that killed God. Once the assassins
of the established order lose their faith in the myth, or, in
other words, in the God who legalizes their crimes, the machinery
of death is turned against its devisers. Revolution was the bourgeoisie's
finest invention. It is also the running noose which will help
it take its leap into oblivion. It is easy to see why bourgeois
thought, strung up as it is on a rope of radicalism of its own
manufacture, clings with the energy of desperation to every reformist
solution, to anything that can prolong its life, even though its
own weight must inevitably drag it down to its doom. Fascism is
in a way a consistent response to this hopeless predicament. It
is like an aesthete dreaming of dragging the whole world down
with him into the abyss, lucid as to the death of his class but
a sophist when he announces the inevitability of universal annihilation.
Today this mise en sc? of death chosen and refused lies at the
core of the spectacle of incoherence.

The organization of appearances aspires to the immobility of the
shadow of a bird in flight. But this aspiration amounts to no
more than a vain hope, bound up with the ruling class's efforts
to solidify its power, of escaping from the course of history.
There is, however, an important difference between myth and its
fragmented, desanctified avatar, the spectacle, with respect to
the way each resists the criticism of facts. The varying importance
assumed in unitary systems by artisans, merchants and bankers
explains the continual oscillation in these societies between
the coherence of myth and the myth of coherence. With the triumph
of the bourgeoisie something very different happens: by introducing
history into the armoury of appearances, the bourgeois revolution
historicizes appearance and thus makes the progression from the
incoherence of the spectacle to the spectacle of incoherence inevitable.

In unitary societies, whenever the merchant class, with its disrespect
for tradition, threatened to deconsecrate values, the coherence
of myth would give way to the myth of coherence. What does this
mean? What had formerly been taken for granted had suddenly to
be vigorously reasserted. Loud professions of faith were heard
where previously faith was so automatic as to need no stating,
and respect for the great had to be preserved through recourse
to the principle of absolute monarchy. I hope closer study will
be given to these paradoxical interregnums of myth during which
we see the bourgeoisie trying to sanctify its rise by means of
a new religion and by self-ennoblement, while the nobility engages
in the corollary but very different activity of gambling on an
impossible transcendence. (The Fronde springs to mind--but so
do the Heraclitean dialectic and Gilles de Rais.) The aristocracy
had the elegance to turn its last words into a witticism; the
bourgeoisie's disappearance from the scene will have but the gravity
of bourgeois thought. As for the forces of revolutionary transcendence,
they surely have more to win from lighthearted death than from
the dead weight of survival.

There comes a time when the myth of coherence is so undermined
by the criticism of facts that it cannot mutate back into a coherent
myth. Appearance, that mirror in which men hide their own choices
from themselves, shatters into a thousand pieces and falls into
the public realm of individual supply and demand. The demise of
appearances means the end of hierarchical power, that facade "with
nothing behind it." The trend is clear, and leaves no room
for doubt as to this final outcome. The Great Revolution was scarcely
over before God's motley successors turned up at bargain prices
as 'unclaimed' items on a pawnbroker's shelves. First came the
Supreme Being and the Bonapartist concordat, and then, hard on
their heels, nationalism, individualism, socialism, national socialism,
and all the other neo-isms--not to mention the individualized
dregs of every imaginable hand-me-down weltanschauung and the
thousands of portable ideologies offered as free gifts every time
someone buys a TV, an item of culture or a box of detergent. Eventually
the decomposition of the spectacle entails the resort to the spectacle
of decomposition. It is in the logic of things that the last actor
should film his own death. As it happens, the logic of things
is the logic of what can be consumed, and sold as it is consumed.
Pataphysics, sub-Dada, and the mise en scène of impoverished
everyday life line the road that leads us with many a twist and
turn to the last graveyards.

2

The development of the drama as a literary genre cannot but throw
light on the question of the organization of appearances. After
all, a play is the simplest form of the organization of appearances,
and a prototype for all more sophisticated forms. As religious
plays designed to reveal the mystery of transcendence to men,
the earliest theatrical forms were indeed the organization of
appearances of their time. And the process of secularization of
the theatre supplied the models for later, spectacular stage management.
Aside from the machinery of war, all machines of ancient times
originated in the needs of the theatre. The crane, the pulley
and other hydraulic devices started out as theatrical paraphernalia;
it was only much later that they revolutionized production relations.
It is a striking fact that no matter how far we go back in time
the domination of the earth and of men seems to depend on techniques
which serve the purposes not only of work but also of illusion.

The birth of tragedy was already a narrowing of the arena in which
primitive men and gods had held their cosmic dialogue. It meant
a distancing, a putting in parentheses, of magical participation.
This was now organized in accordance with a refraction of the
principles of initiation, and no longer involved the rites themselves.
What emerged was a spectaculum, a thing seen, while the gradual
relegation of the gods to the role of mere props presaged their
eventual eviction from the social scene as a whole. Once mythic
relationships have been dissolved by secularizing tendencies,
tragedy is superseded by drama. Comedy is a good indicator of
this transition: with all the vigour of a completely new force,
its corrosive humour devastates tragedy in its dotage. Molière's
Don Juan and the parody of Handel in John Gay's Beggar's Opera
bear sufficiently eloquent testimony on this score.

With the advent of drama human society replaces the gods on the
stage. Now, although it is true that nineteenth-century theatre
was merely one form of entertainment among others, we must not
let this obscure the much more important fact that during this
period theatre left the theatre, so to speak, and colonized the
entire social arena. The cliché which likens life to a
drama seems to evoke a fact so obvious as to need no discussion.
So widespread is the confusion between play-acting and life that
it does not even occur to us to wonder why it exists. Yet what
is 'natural' about the fact that I stop being myself a hundred
times a day and slip into the skin of people whose concerns and
importance I have really not the slightest desire to know about?
Not that I might not choose to be an actor on occasion--to play
a role for diversion or pleasure. But this is not the type of
role-playing I have in mind. The actor supposed to play a condemned
man in a realist play is at perfect liberty to remain himself:
herein lies, in fact, the paradox of fine acting. But this freedom
that he enjoys is contingent upon the fact that this "condemned
man" is in no danger of feeling a real hangman's noose about
his neck. The roles we play in everyday life, on the other hand,
soak into the individual, preventing him from being what he really
is and what he really wants to be. They are nuclei of alienation
embedded in the flesh of direct experience. The function of such
stereotypes is to dictate to each person on an individual, even
'intimate', level the same things which ideology imposes collectively.

* * *

Chapter 15

Stereotypes are the dominant images of a period, the
images of the dominant spectacle. The stereotype is the model
of the role; the role is a model form of behaviour. The repetition
of an attitude creates a role; the repetition of a role creates
a stereotype. The stereotype is an objective form into which people
are integrated by means of the role. Skill in playing and handling
roles determines rank in the spectacular hierarchy. The degeneration
of the spectacle brings about the proliferation of stereotypes
and roles, which by the same token become risible, and converge
dangerously upon their negation, i.e., spontaneous actions (1,2).
Access to the role occurs by means of identification. The need
to identify is more important to Power's stability than the models
identified with. Identification is a pathological state, but only
accidental identifications are officially classed as ``mental
illness.'' Roles are the bloodsuckers of the will to live (3).
They express lived experience, yet at the same time they reify
it. They also offer consolation for this impoverishment of life
by supplying a surrogate, neurotic gratification. We have to break
free of roles by restoring them to the realm of play (4). A role
successfully adopted ensures promotion in the spectacular hierarchy,
the rise from a given rank to a higher one. This is the process
of initiation, as manifested notably in the cult of names and
the use of photography. Specialists are those initiates who supervise
initiation. The always partial expertise of specialists is a component
part of the systematic strategy of Power, Power which destroys
us even as it destroys itself (5). The degeneration of the spectacle
makes roles interchangeable. The proliferation of unreal changes
creates the preconditions for a sole and real change, a truly
radical change. The weight of inauthenticity finally provokes
a violent and quasi-biological reaction from the will to live
(6).

1

Our efforts, our boredom, our defeats, the absurdity of our actions
all stem most of the time from the imperious necessity in our
present situation of playing hybrid parts, parts which appear
to answer our desires, but which are really antagonistic to them.
``We would live,'' says Pascal, ``according to the ideas of others;
we would live an imaginary life, and to this end we cultivate
appearances. Yet in striving to beautify and preserve this imaginary
being we neglect everything authentic.'' This was an original
thought in the seventeenth century; at a time when the system
of appearances was still hale, its coming crisis was apprehended
only in the inhibitive flashes of the most lucid. Today, amidst
the decomposition of all values, Pascal's observation states only
what is obvious to everyone. By what magic do we attribute the
liveliness of human passions to lifeless forms? Why do we succumb
to the seduction of borrowed attitudes? What are roles?

Is what drives people to seek power the very weakness to which
Power reduces them? The tyrant is irked by the duties the subjection
of his people imposes on him. The price he pays for the divine
consecration of his authority over men is perpetual mythic sacrifice,
a permanent humility before God. The moment he quits God's service,
he no longer `serves' his people and his people are immediately
released from their obligation to serve him. What vox populi,
vox dei really means is: ``What God wants, the people want.''
Slaves are not willing slaves for long if they are not compensated
for their submission by a shred of power: all subjection entails
the right to a measure of power, and there is no such thing as
power that does not embody a degree of submission. This is why
some agree so readily to be governed. Wherever it is exercised,
on every rung of the ladder, power is partial, not absolute. It
is thus ubiquitous, but ever open to challenge.

The role is a consumption of power. It locates one in the representational
hierarchy, and hence in the spectacle: at the top, at the bottom,
in the middle but never outside the hierarchy, whether this side
of it or beyond it. The role is thus the means of access to the
mechanism of culture: a form of initiation. It is also the medium
of exchange of individual sacrifice, and in this sense performs
a compensatory function. And lastly, as a residue of separation,
it strives to construct a behavioural unity; in this aspect it
depends on identification.

2

In a restrictive sense, the expression ``to play a role in society''
clearly implies that roles are a distinction reserved for a chosen
few. Roman slaves, medieval serfs, agricultural day-labourers,
proletarians brutalized by a thirteen-hour day -the likes of these
do not have roles, or they have such rudimentary ones that `refined'
people consider them more animals than men. There is, after all,
such a thing as poverty founded on exclusion from the poverty
of the spectacle. By the nineteenth century, however, the distinction
between good worker and bad worker had begun to gain ground as
a popular notion, just as that between master and slave had been
vulgarized, along with Christ, under the earlier, mythic system.
It is true that the spread of this new idea was achieved with
less effort, and that it never acquired the importance of the
master-slave idea (although it was significant enough for Marx
to deem it worthy of his derision). So, just like mythic sacrifice,
roles have been democratized. Inauthenticity is a right of man;
such, in a word, is the triumph of socialism. Take a thirty-five-year-old
man. Each morning he takes his car, drives to the office, pushes
papers, has lunch in town, plays pool, pushes more papers, leaves
work, has a couple of drinks, goes home, greets his wife, kisses
his children, eats his steak in front of the TV, goes to bed,
makes love, and falls asleep. Who reduces a man's life to this
pathetic sequence of clichés? A journalist? A cop? A market
researcher? A socialist-realist author? Not at all. He does it
himself, breaking his day down into a series of poses chosen more
or less unconsciously from the range of dominant stereotypes.
Taken over body and consciousness by the blandishments of a succession
of images, he rejects authentic satisfaction and espouses a passionless
asceticism: his pleasures are so mitigated, yet so demonstrative,
that they can only be a facade. The assumption of one role after
another, provided he mimics stereotypes successfully, is titillating
to him. Thus the satisfaction derived from a well-played role
is in direct proportion to his distance from himself, to his self-negation
and self-sacrifice.

What power masochism has! Just as others were Count of Sandomir,
Palatine of Smirnoff, Margrave of Thorn, Duke of Courlande, so
he invests his poses as driver, employee, superior, subordinate,
colleague, customer, seducer, friend, philatelist, husband, paterfamilias,
viewer, citizen with a quite personal majesty. And yet such a
man cannot be entirely reduced to the idiotic machine, the lethargic
puppet, that all this implies. For brief moments his daily life
must generate an energy which, if only it were not rechannelled,
dispersed and squandered in roles, would suffice to overthrow
the world of survival. Who can gauge the striking-power of an
impassioned daydream, of pleasure taken in love, of a nascent
desire, of a rush of sympathy? Everyone seeks spontaneously to
extend such brief moments of real life; everyone wants basically
to make something whole out of their everyday life. But conditioning
succeeds in making most of us pursue these moments in exactly
the wrong way by way of the inhuman with the result that we lose
what we most want at the very moment we attain it.

* * *

Stereotypes have a life and death of their own. Thus an image
whose magnetism makes it a model for thousands of individual roles
will eventually crumble and disappear in accordance with the laws
of consumption, the laws of constant novelty and universal obsolescence.
So how does spectacular society find new stereotypes? It finds
them thanks to that injection of real creativity which prevents
some roles from conforming to ageing stereotypes (rather as language
gets a new lease on life through the assimilation of popular forms).
Thanks, in other words, to that element of play which transforms
roles.

To the extent that it conforms to a stereotype, a role tends to
congeal, to take on the static nature of its model. Such a role
has neither present, nor past, nor future, because its time resembles
exposure time, and is, so to speak, a pause in time: time compressed
into the dissociated space-time which is that of Power. (Here
again we see the truth of the argument that Power's strength lies
in its facility in enforcing both actual separation and false
union.) The timeless moment of the role may be compared to the
cinematic image, or rather to one of its elements, to one frame,
to one image in the series of images of minimally varying predetermined
attitudes whose reproduction constitutes a shot. In the case of
roles reproduction is ensured by the rhythms of the advertising
media, whose power of dissemination is the precondition for a
role's achievement of the status of a stereotype (Monroe, Sagan,
Dean). No matter how much or how little limelight a given role
attains in the public eye, however, its prime function is always
that of social adaptation, of integrating people into the well
policed universe of things. Which is why there are hidden cameras
always ready to catapult the most pedestrian of lives into the
spotlight of instant fame. Bleeding hearts fill columns, and superfluous
body hair becomes an affair of Beauty. When the spectacle battening
on to everyday life takes a pair of unhappy lovers and mass-markets
them as Tristan and Isolde, sells a tattered derelict as a piece
of nostalgia, or makes a drudging housewife into a good fairy
of the kitchen, it is already way ahead of anything modern art
can dream up. It was inevitable, perhaps, that people would end
up modelling themselves on collages of smiling spouses, crippled
children and do-it-yourself geniuses. At any rate we have reached
that point and such ploys always pay off. On the other hand the
spectacle is fast approaching a saturation point, the point immediately
prior to the eruption of everyday reality. For roles now operate
on a level perilously close to their own negation: already the
average failure is hard put to it to play his role properly, and
some maladjusted people refuse their roles altogether. As it falls
apart, the spectacular system starts scraping the barrel, drawing
nourishment from the lowest social strata. It is forced, in fact,
to eat its own shit. Thus tone-deaf singers, talent-free artists,
reluctant laureates and pallid stars of all kinds emerge periodically
to cross the firmament of the media, their rank in the hierarchy
being determined by the regularity with which they achieve this
feat.

Which leaves the hopeless cases those who reject all roles and
those who develop a theory and practice of this refusal. From
such maladjustment to spectacular society a new poetry of real
experience and a reinvention of life are bound to spring. The
deflation of roles precipitates the decompression of spectacular
time in favour of lived space-time. What is living intensely if
not the mobilization and redirection of the current of time, so
long arrested and lost in appearances? Are not the happiest moments
of our lives glimpses of an expanded present that rejects Power's
accelerated time which dribbles away year after year, for as long
as it takes to grow old?

3

Identification. The principle of Szondi's test is well known.
The patient is asked to choose, from forty-eight photographs of
people in various types of paroxystic crisis, those which evoke
sympathy in him and those which evoke aversion. The subject invariably
prefers those faces expressing instinctual feelings which he accepts
in himself, and rejects those expressing ones which he represses.
The results enable the psychiatrist to draw up an instinctual
profile of his patient which helps him decide whether to discharge
him or send him to the air-conditioned crematorium known as a
mental hospital.

Consider now the needs of consumer society, a society in which
man's essence is to consume to consume Coca-Cola, literature,
ideas, emotions, architecture, TV, power, etc. Consumer goods,
ideologies, stereotypes all play the part of photos in a gigantic
version of Szondi's test in which each of us is supposed to take
part, not merely by making a choice, but by a commitment, by practical
activity. This society's need to market objects, ideas and model
forms of behaviour calls for a decoding centre where an instinctual
profile of the consumer can be constructed to help in product
design and improvement, and in the creation of new needs liable
to increase consumption. Market research, motivation techniques,
opinion polls, sociological surveys and structuralism may all
be considered a part of this project, no matter how anarchic and
feeble their contributions may be as yet. The cyberneticians can
certainly supply the missing co-ordination and rationalization
if they are given the chance.

At first glance the main thing would seem to be the choice of
the ``consumable image.'' The housewife-who-uses-Fairy-Snow is
different and the difference is measured in profits from the housewife-who-uses-Tide.
The Labour voter differs from the Conservative voter, and the
Communist from the Christian, in much the same way. But such differences
are increasingly hard to discern. The spectacle of incoherence
ends up putting a value on the vanishing point of values. Eventually,
identification with anything at all, like the need to consume
anything at all, becomes more important than brand loyalty to
a particular type of car, idol, or politician. The essential thing,
after all, is to alienate people from their desires and pen them
in the spectacle, in the occupied zone. It matters little whether
people are good or bad, honest or criminal, left-wing or right-wing:
the form is irrelevant, just so long as they lose themselves in
it. Let those who cannot identify with Khrushchev identify with
Yevtushenko; this should cover everyone but hooligans and we can
deal with them. And indeed it is the third force alone that has
nothing to identify with no enemy, no pseudo-revolutionary leader.
The third force is the force of identity that identity in which
everyone recognizes and discovers himself. There, at least, no
one makes decisions for me, or in my name; there my freedom is
the freedom of all.

* * *

There is no such thing as mental illness. It is merely a convenient
label for grouping and isolating cases where identification has
not occurred properly. Those whom Power can neither govern nor
kill, it taxes with madness. The category includes extremists
and megalomaniacs of the role, as well as those who deride roles
or refuse them. It is only the isolation of such individuals which
condemns them, however. Let a General identify with France, with
the support of millions of voters, and an opposition immediately
springs up which seriously seeks to rival him in his lunacy. Horbiger's
attempt to invent a Nazi physics met with a similar kind of success.
General Walker was taken seriously when he drew a distinction
between superior, white, divine and capitalist man on the one
hand, and black, demoniacal, communist man on the other. Franco
would meditate devoutly and beg God for guidance in oppressing
Spain. Everywhere in the world are leaders whose cold frenzy lends
substance to the thesis that man is a machine for ruling. True
madness is a function not of isolation but of identification.

The role is the self-caricature which we carry about with us everywhere,
and which brings us everywhere face to face with an absence. An
absence, though, which is structured, dressed up, prettified.
The roles of paranoiac, schizophrenic or psychopath do not carry
the seal of social usefulness; in other words, they are not distributed
under the label of power, as are the roles of cop, boss, or military
officer. But they do have a utility in specified places in asylums
and prisons. Such places are museums of a sort, serving the double
purpose, from Power's point of view, of confining dangerous rivals
while at the same time supplying the spectacle with needed negative
stereotypes. For bad examples and their exemplary punishment add
spice to the spectacle and protect it. If identification were
maximized through increased isolation, the ultimate falseness
of the distinction between mental and social alienation would
soon become clear.

At the opposite extreme from absolute identification is a particular
way of putting a distance between the role and one's self, a way
of establishing a zone of free play. This zone is a breeding place
of attitudes disruptive of the spectacular order. Nobody is ever
completely swallowed up by a role. Even turned on its head, the
will to live retains a potential for violence always capable of
carrying the individual away from the path laid down for him.
One fine morning, the faithful lackey, who has hitherto identified
completely with his master, leaps on his oppressor and slits his
throat. For he has reached that point where his right to bite
like a dog has finally aroused his desire to strike back like
a human being. Diderot has described this moment well in Rameau's
Nephew and the case of the Papin sisters illustrates it even better.
The fact is that identification, like all manifestations of inhumanity,
has its roots in the human. Inauthentic life feeds on authentically
felt desires. And identification through roles is doubly successful
in this respect. In the first place it co-opts the pleasure to
be derived from metamorphoses, from putting on masks and going
about in different disguises. Secondly, it appropriates mankind's
ancient love of mazes, the love of getting lost solely in order
to find one's way again: the pleasure of the derive. In this way
roles also lay under contribution the reflex of identity, the
desire to find the richest and truest part of ourselves in other
people. The game ceases to involve play: it petrifies because
the players can no longer make up the rules. The quest for identity
degenerates into identification.

Let us reverse the perspective for a moment. A psychiatrist tells
us that ``Recognition by society leads the individual to expend
his sexual drives on cultural goals, and this is the best way
for him to defend himself against these drives.'' Read: the aim
of roles is to absorb vital energies, to reduce erotic energy
by ensuring it permanent sublimation. The less erotic reality
there is, the more the sexualized forms appearing in the spectacle.
Roles Reich would say `armouring' guarantee orgastic impotence.
Conversely, true pleasure, joie de vivre and orgastic potency
shatter body armour and roles. If individuals could stop seeing
the world through the eyes of the powers-that-be, and look at
it from their own point of view, they would have no trouble discerning
which actions are really liberating, which moments are lightning
flashes in the dark night of roles. Real experience can illuminate
roles can x-ray them, so to speak in such a way as to retrieve
the energy invested in them, to extricate the truth from the lies.
This task is at once individual and collective. Though all roles
alienate equally, some are more vulnerable than others. It is
easier to escape the role of a libertine than the role of a cop,
executive or rabbi. A fact to which everyone should give a little
thought.

4

Compensation. The ultimate reason why people come to value roles
more highly than their own lives is that their lives are priceless.
What this means, in its ambiguity, is that life cannot be priced,
cannot be marketed; and also that such riches can only be described
according to the spectacle's categories as intolerable poverty.
In the eyes of consumer society poverty is whatever cannot be
brought down to terms of consumption. From the spectacular point
of view the reduction of man to consumer is an enrichment: the
more things he has, the more roles he plays, the more he is. So
it is decreed by the organization of appearances. But, from the
point of view of lived reality, all power so attained is paid
for by the sacrifice of true self-realization. What is gained
on the level of appearances is lost on the level of being and
becoming.

Thus lived experience always furnishes the raw material of the
social contract, the coin in which the entry fee is paid. Life
is sacrificed, and the loss compensated by means of accomplished
prestidigitation in the realm of appearances. The more daily life
is thus impoverished, the greater the attraction of inauthenticity,
and vice versa. Dislodged from its essential place by the bombardment
of prohibitions, limitations and lies, lived reality comes to
seem so trivial that appearances become the centre of our attention,
until roles completely obscure the importance of our own lives.
In an order of things, compensation is the only thing that gives
a person any weight. The role compensates for a lack: ultimately,
for the lack of life; more immediately, for the lack of another
role. A worker conceals his prostration beneath the role of foreman,
and the poverty of this role itself beneath the incomparably superior
image of a late-model car. But every role is paid for by self-injury
(overwork, the renunciation of `luxuries', survival, etc.). At
best it is an ineffective plug for the gaping wound left by the
vampirization of the self and of real life. The role is at once
a threat and a protective shield. Its threatening aspect is only
felt subjectively, however, and does not exist officially. Officially,
the only danger lies in the loss or devaluation of the role: in
loss of honour, loss of dignity, or (happy phrase!) loss of face.
This ambiguity accounts to my mind for people's addiction to roles.
It explains why roles stick to our skin, why we give up our lives
for them. They impoverish real experience but they also protect
this experience from becoming conscious of its impoverishment.
Indeed, so brutal a revelation would probably be too much for
an isolated individual to take. Thus roles partake of organized
isolation, of separation, of false union, while compensation is
the depressant that ensures the realization of all the potentialities
of inauthenticity, that gets us high on identification.

Survival and its protective illusions form an inseparable whole.
The end of survival naturally entails the disappearance of roles
(although there are some dead people whose names are linked to
stereotypes). Survival without roles is to be officially dead.
Just as we are condemned to survival, so we are condemned to ``keep
up appearances'' in the realm of inauthenticity. Armouring inhibits
freedom of gesture but also deadens blows. Beneath this carapace
we are completely vulnerable. But at least we can still play ``let's
pretend'' we still have a chance to play roles off against one
another.

Rosanov's approach is not a bad one: ``Externally, I decline.
Subjectively, I am quite indeclinable. I don't agree. I'm a kind
of adverb.'' In the end, of course, the world must be modelled
on subjectivity: then I will `agree' with myself in order to `agree'
with others. But, right now, to throw out all roles like a bag
of old clothes would amount to denying the fact of separation
and plunging into mysticism or solipsism. I am in enemy territory,
and the enemy is within me. I don't want him to kill me, and the
armour of roles gives me a measure of protection. I work, I consume,
I know how to be polite, how to avoid aggravation, how to keep
a low profile. All the same, this world of pretence has to be
destroyed, which is why it is a shrewd course to let roles play
each other off. Seeming to have no responsibility is the best
way of behaving responsibly toward oneself. All jobs are dirty
so do them dirtily! All roles are lies, but leave them alone and
they'll give each other the lie! I love the arrogance of Jacques
Vache when he writes: ``I wander from ruins to village with my
monocle of Crystal and a disturbing theory of painting. I have
been in turn a lionized author, a celebrated pornographic draftsman
and a scandalous cubist painter. Now I am going to stay at home
and let others explain and debate my personality in the light
of the above mentioned indications.'' My only responsibility is
to be absolutely honest with those who are on my side, those who
are true partisans of authentic life.

The more detached one is from a role, the easier it becomes to
turn it against the enemy. The more effectively one avoids the
weight of things, the easier it is to achieve lightness of movement.
Comrades care little for forms. They argue openly, confident in
the knowledge that they cannot inflict wounds on each other. Where
communication is genuinely sought, misunderstandings are no crime.
But if you accost me armed to the teeth, understanding agreement
only in terms of a victory for you, then you will get nothing
out of me but an evasive pose, and a formal silence intended to
indicate that the discussion is closed. For interchange on the
basis of contending roles is useless a priori. Only the enemy
wants to fight on the terrain of roles, according to the rules
of the spectacle. It is hard enough keeping one's phantoms at
arm's length: who needs `friendships' which put us back on the
same footing? Would that biting and barking could wake people
up to the dog's life roles force them to live wake them up to
the importance of their selves!

Fortunately, the spectacle of incoherence is obliged to introduce
an element of play into roles. Its levelling of all ethical distinctions
makes it impossible to take seriously. The playful approach to
roles leaves them floating in the sea of its indifference. This
accounts for the rather unhappy efforts of our reorganizers of
appearances to increase the playful element (TV game shows, etc.),
to press flippancy into the service of consumption. The disintegration
of appearances tends to foster distancing from roles. Some roles,
being dubious or ambiguous, embody their own self-criticism. The
spectacle is destined eventually for reconversion into a collective
game. Daily life, seizing whatever means it has to hand, will
establish the preconditions for this game's never-ending expansion.

5

Initiation. As it seeks to safeguard the poverty of survival by
loudly protesting against it, the compensatory tendency bestows
upon each individual a certain number of formal possibilities
of participating in the spectacle a sort of permit for the scenic
representation of one or more slices of (private or public) life.
Just as God used to bestow grace on all men, leaving each free
to choose salvation or damnation, so modern social organization
accords everyone the right to be a success or a failure in the
social world. But whereas God appropriated human subjectivity
in one fell swoop, the bourgeoisie commandeers it by means of
a series of partial alienations. In one sense, therefore, there
is progress here: subjectivity, which was nothing, becomes something;
it attains its own truth, its mystery, its passions, its rationality,
its rights. But this official recognition is bought at the price
of its subdivision into components which are graded and pigeonholed
according to Power's norms. Subjectivity attains objective form
as stereotypes, by means of identification. In the process it
has to be broken up into would-be-absolute fragments and pathetically
reduced (witness the Romantics' grotesque treatment of the self,
and the antidote for it, humour).

I possess badges of power, therefore I am. In order to be someone
the individual must pay things their due. He must keep his roles
in order, polish them up, enter into them repeatedly, and initiate
himself little by little until he qualifies for promotion in the
spectacle. The conveyor belts called schools, the advertising
industry, the conditioning mechanisms inseparable from any Order
-all conspire to lead the child, the adolescent and the adult
as painlessly as possible into the big family of consumers.

There are different stages of initiation. Recognized social groups
do not all enjoy the same measure of power, nor is that measure
equally distributed within each group. It is a long way, in hierarchical
terms, from the boss to his workers, from the star to his fans,
or from the politician to his supporters. Some groups have a much
more rigid structure than others. But all are founded on the illusion
of participation shared by every group member whatever his rank.
This illusion is fostered through meetings, insignia, the distribution
of minor `responsibilities', etc. The spurious solidarities maintained
by such expedients are often friable. This boyscout mentality
is frighteningly pervasive, and it throws up its own stereotypes,
its own martyrs, heroes, models, geniuses, thinkers, good niggers,
great successes e.g., Tania, Cienfuegos, Brando, Dylan, Sartre,
a national darts champion, Lin Piao. (The reader is asked to assign
each to the appropriate category....)

Can the collectivization of roles successfully replace the quondam
power of the old ideologies? It has to be remembered that Power
stands or falls with the organization of appearances. The fission
of myth into particles of ideology has produced roles as fallout.
The poverty of power now has no means of self-concealment aside
from its lie-in-pieces. The prestige of a film star, a head of
a family, or a chief executive is not worth a wet fart. Nothing
can escape the effects of this nihilistic process of decomposition
except its transcendence. Even a technocratic victory preventing
this transcendence can only amount to the condemnation of people
to meaningless activity, to rites of initiation leading nowhere,
to unrewarded sacrifice, to enrollment without roles, t o specialization.

The specialist is, indeed, an adumbration of just such a chimerical
being, cog, mechanical thing, housed in the rationality of a perfect
social order of zombies. He turns up everywhere among politicians,
among hijackers. Specialization is in a sense the science of roles,
the science of endowing appearances with the éclat formerly
bestowed by nobility, wit, extravagance or wealth. The specialist
does more than this, however, for he enrolls himself in order
to enroll others. He is the vital link between the techniques
of production and consumption and the technique of spectacular
representation. Yet he is, so to speak, an isolated link a monad.
Knowing everything about a small area, he enlists others to produce
and consume within the confines of this area so that he himself
may receive a surplus-value of power and increase the significance
of his own hierarchical image. He knows, if need be, how to give
up a multitude of roles for one only, how to concentrate his power
instead of spreading it around, how to make his life unilinear.
When he does this he becomes a manager. His misfortune is that
the sphere within which he exercises power is always too restricted,
too partial. He is like the gastro-enterologist who cures a stomach
but poisons the rest of the body in the process. Naturally, the
importance of the group which he holds in thrall can allow him
the illusion of power, but the anarchy is such, the clash of contradictory
competing interests so violent, that he must eventually realize
how powerless he really is. Just as heads of state with the power
to unleash thermonuclear war contrive to paralyze each other,
so specialists, by working at cross-purposes, construct and (in
the last analysis) operate a gigantic machine Power, social organization
which dominates them all and oppresses them in varying degrees
according to their importance as cogs. They construct and operate
this machine blindly, because it is simply the aggregate of their
crossed purposes. We may expect, therefore, that in the case of
most specialists the sudden consciousness of such a disastrous
passivity, a passivity in which they have invested so much effort,
will eventually fling them all the more energetically in the direction
of an authentic will to live. It is also predictable that others
among them, those who have been longer or more intensely exposed
to the radiation of authoritarian passivity, will follow the example
of the officer in Kafka's Penal Colony and perish along with the
machine, tormented to the end by its last spasms. Every day the
crossed purposes of the powerful make and unmake the tottering
majesty of Power. We have seen with what results. Let us now try
to imagine the glacial nightmare into which we would be plunged
were the cyberneticians able so to co-ordinate their efforts as
to achieve a rational organization of society, eliminating or
at any rate reducing the effects of crossed purposes. They would
have no rivals for the Nobel Prize, save perhaps the proponents
of thermonuclear suicide.

* * *

The widespread use of name and photograph, as in what are laughingly
referred to as `identification' papers, is rather obviously tied
up with the police function in modern societies. But the connection
is not merely with the vulgar police work of search, surveillance,
harassment, torture and murder incorporated. It also involves
much more occult methods of maintaining law and order. The frequency
with which an individual's name or image passes through the visual
and oral channels of communication is an index of that individual's
rank and category. It goes without saying that the name most often
uttered in a neighbourhood, town, country, or in the world has
a powerful fascination. Charted statistically for any given time
and place, this information would supply a perfect relief map
of Power.

Historically, however, the degeneration of roles goes hand in
hand with the increasing meaninglessness of names. The aristocrat's
name crystallizes the mystery of birth and title. In consumer
society the spectacular exposure of the name of a Bernard Buffet
serves to transform a very ordinary talent into a famous painter.
The manipulation of names fabricates leaders in the same way as
it sells shampoo. But this also means that a famous name is no
longer the attribute of the one who bears it. The name `Buffet'
does not designate anything except a thing and a pig in a poke.
It is a fragment of power.

I laugh when I hear the humanists whining about the reduction
of people to ciphers. What makes them think the destruction of
men complete with tricked-up names is any less inhuman than their
destruction as a set of numbers? I have already said that the
obscure antagonism between the would-be progressives and the reactionaries
boils down to this: should people be smashed by punishments or
by rewards? As for the reward of celebrity, thanks for nothing!

In any case, it is things that have names nowadays, not people.
To reverse the perspective, however, it makes me happy to think
that what I am cannot be reduced to a name. My pleasure is nameless:
those all too rare moments when I act for myself afford no handhold
for external manipulation of whatever kind. It is only when I
accede to the dispossession of my self that I risk petrification
amidst the names of the things which oppress me. This is the context
in which to grasp the full meaning of Albert Libertad's burning
of his identification papers. Such an act echoed much later by
the black workers of Johannesburg is more than a rejection of
police control: it is a way of giving up one name so as to have
the pick of a thousand. Such is the superb dialectic of the change
in perspective: since the powers-that-be forbid me to bear a name
which is as it was for the feudal lord a true emanation of my
strength, I refuse to be called by any name, and suddenly beneath
the nameless I discover the wealth of real life, inexpressible
poetry, the antechamber of transcendence. I enter the nameless
forest where Lewis Carroll's gnat explains to Alice: ``If the
governess wanted to call you for your lessons, she would call
out `Come here -', and there she would have to leave off, because
there wouldn't be any name for her to call, and of course you
wouldn't have to go, you know.'' The blissful forest of radical
subjectivity.

Giorgio de Chirico, to my mind, also has an admirably lucid knowledge
of the way to Alice's forest. What holds for names holds too for
the representation of the face. The photograph is the expression
par excellence of the role, of the pose. It imprisons the soul
and offers it up for inspection this is why a photograph is always
sad. We examine it as we examine an object. And, true enough,
to identify oneself with a range of facial expressions, no matter
how broad a range, is a form of self-objectification. The God
of the mystics at least had the good sense to avoid this trap.
But let us get back to Chirico a near contemporary of Libertad's.
(Power, if only it were human, would be proud of the number of
potential encounters it has successfully prevented.) The blank
faces of Chirico's figures are the perfect indictment of inhumanity.
His deserted squares and petrified backgrounds display man dehumanized
by the things he has made things which, frozen in an urban space
crystallizing the oppressive power of ideologies, rob him of his
substance and suck his blood. (I forget who speaks somewhere of
vampiric landscapes; Breton, perhaps.) More than this, the absence
of facial features seems to conjure up new faces, to materialize
a presence capable of investing the very stones with humanity.
For me this ghostly presence is that of collective creation: because
they have no one's face, Chirico's figures evoke everyone.

In striking contrast to the fundamental tendency of modern sculpture,
which goes to great lengths to express its own nothingness and
concocts a semiology on the basis of its nullity, Chirico gives
us paintings in which this absence is evoked solely as a means
of intimating what lies beyond it namely, the poetry of reality
and the realization of art, of philosophy, of man. As the sign
of a reified world, the blank space is incorporated into the canvas
at the crucial spot; the implication is that the countenance is
no longer part of the representational universe, but is about
to become part of everyday praxis.

One of these days the incomparable wealth of the decade between
1910 and 1920 will be clearly seen. The genius of these years,
however primitive and intuitive, lay in the fact that for the
first time an attempt was made to bridge the gulf between art
and life. I think we may safely say that, the surrealist adventure
aside, nothing was achieved in the period between the demise of
this vanguard of transcendence and the inception of the situationist
project. The disillusionment of the older generation which has
been marking time for the last forty years, as much in the realm
of art as in that of social revolution, merely reinforces this
view. Dada, Malevich's white square, Ulysses, Chirico's canvasses
-all impregnated the absence of man reduced to the state of a
thing with the presence of the whole man. And today the whole
man is simply the project which the majority of men harbour under
the sign of a forbidden creativity.

6

In the unitary world, under the serene gaze of the gods, adventure
and pilgrimage were paradigms of change in an unchanging universe.
Inasmuch as this world was given for all time there was really
nothing to be discovered, but revelation awaited the pilgrim,
knight or wanderer at the crossroads. Actually revelation lay
within each individual: the seeker would travel the world seeking
it in himself, seeking it in far lands, until suddenly it would
surge forth, a magical spring released by the purity of a gesture
at the same place where the ill-favoured seeker would have found
nothing. The spring and the castle dominate the creative imagination
of the Middle Ages. The symbolic theme here is plain: beneath
movement lies immutability, and beneath immutability, movement.

Wherein lies the greatness of Heliogabalus, Tamerlane, Gilles
de Rais, Tristan, Perceval? In the fact that, once vanquished,
they withdraw into a living God; they identify with the demiurge,
abandoning their unsatisfied humanity in order to reign and die
under the mask of divine awe. This death of men, which is the
God of the immutable, lets life bloom under the shadow of its
scythe. Our dead God weighs more heavily than the living God of
old; for the bourgeoisie has not completely disposed of God, it
has only contrived to air-condition his corpse. (The Romantic
attitude was a reaction to the odour of that corpse's putrefaction,
a disgusted wrinkling of the nostrils at the conditions imposed
by survival.)

As a class rent by contradictions, the bourgeoisie founds its
domination on the transformation of the world, yet refuses to
transform itself. It is thus a movement wishing to avoid movement.
In unitary societies the image of immutability embraced movement;
in fragmentary societies change seeks to reproduce immutability:
``Wars (or the poor, or slaves) will always be with us.'' Thus
the bourgeoisie in power can tolerates change only if it is empty,
abstract, cut off from the whole: partial change, changes of parts.
Now although the habit of change is intrinsically subversive,
it is also the main prerequisite to the functioning of consumer
society. People have to change cars, fashions, ideas, etc., all
the time. For if they did not, a more radical change would occur
which would put an end to a form of authority that is already
reduced to putting itself up for sale as parcels of power: it
has to be consumed at all costs, and one of the costs is that
everyone is consumed along with it. Sad to say, this headlong
rush towards death, this desperate and would-be endless race deprives
us of any real future: ahead lies the past, hastily disguised
and projected forward in time. For decades now the selfsame `novelties'
have been turning up in the marketplace of fad and fancy, with
the barest attempt to conceal their decrepitude. The same is true
in the supermarket of the role. The system is confronted by the
problem of how to supply a variety of roles wide enough to compensate
for the loss of the qualitative force of the role as it existed
in the prebourgeois era. This is a hopeless task for two reasons.
In the first place, the quantitative character of roles is a limitation
by definition, and inevitably engenders the demand for a conversion
into quality. Secondly, the lie of renewal cannot be sustained
within the poverty of the spectacle. The constant need for fresh
roles forces a resort to remakes, to transparent mummery. The
proliferation of trivial changes titillates the desire for real
change but never satisfies it. Power accelerates changes in illusions,
thereby hastening the eruption of reality, of radical change.

It is not just that the increasing number of roles tends to make
them indistinguishable, it also triturates them and makes them
ludicrous. The quantification of subjectivity has created spectacular
categories for the most prosaic acts and the most ordinary attributes:
a certain smile, a chest measurement, a hairstyle. Great roles
are few and far between; walk-ons are a dime a dozen. Even the
Ubus the Stalins, Hitlers or Mussolinis have but the palest of
successors. Most of us are well acquainted with the malaise that
accompanies any attempt to join a group and make contact with
others. This feeling amounts to stage fright, the fear of not
playing one's part properly. Only with the crumbling of officially
controllable attitudes and poses will the true source of this
anxiety become clear to us. For it arises not from our clumsiness
in handling roles but from the loss of self in the spectacle,
in the order of things. In his book Medecine et homme total, Soli
has this to say about the frightening spread of neurotic disorders:
``There is no such thing as disease per se, no such thing, even,
as a sick person per se: all there is is authentic or inauthentic
being-in-the-world.'' The reconversion of the energy robbed by
appearances into the will to live authentically is a function
of the dialectic of appearances itself. The refusal of inauthenticity
triggers a near-biological defensive reaction which because of
its violence has a very good chance of destroying those who have
been orchestrating the spectacle of alienation all this time.
This fact should give pause to all who pride themselves on being
idols, artists, sociologists, thinkers and specialists of every
kind of mise en scene. Explosions of popular anger are never accidental.

* * *

According to a Chinese philosopher, ``Confluence tends towards
the void. In total confluence presence stirs.'' Alienation extends
to all human activities and dissociates them in the extreme. But
by the same token it loses its own coherence and becomes everywhere
more vulnerable. In the disintegration of the spectacle we see
what Marx called ``the new life which becomes self-aware, destroys
what is already destroyed, and rejects what is already rejected.''
Beneath dissociation lies unity; beneath fatigue, concentrated
energy; beneath the fragmentation of the self, radical subjectivity.
In other words, the qualitative. But there is more to wanting
to remake the world than wanting to make love to your lover.

With the weakening of the factors responsible for the etiolation
of everyday life, the forces of life tend to get the upper hand
over the power of roles. This is the beginning of the reversal
of perspective. Modern revolutionary theory should concentrate
its efforts on this area so as to open the breach that leads to
transcendence. As the period of calculation and suspicion ushered
in by capitalism and Stalinism draws to a close, it is challenged
from within by the initial phase, based on clandestine tactics,
of the era of play.

The degenerate state of the spectacle, individual experience,
collective acts of refusal these supply the context for development
of practical tactics for dealing with roles. Collectively it is
quite possible to abolish roles. The spontaneous creativity and
festive atmosphere given free rein in revolutionize moments afford
ample evidence of this. When people are overtaken by joie de vivre
they are lost to leadership and stage management of any kind.
Only by starving the revolutionary masses of joy can one become
their master: uncontained, collective pleasure can only go from
victory to victory. Meanwhile it is already possible for a group
dedicated to theoretical and practical actions, like the situationists,
to infiltrate the political and cultural spectacle as a subversive
force. Individually and thus in a strictly temporary way we must
learn how to sustain roles without strengthening them to the point
where they are detrimental to us. How to use them as a protective
shield while at the same time protecting ourselves against them.
How to retrieve the energy they absorb and actualize the illusory
power they dispense. How to play the game of a Jacques Vache.

If your role imposes a role on others, assume this power which
is not you, then set this phantom loose. Nobody wins in struggles
for prestige, so don't bother with them. Down with pointless quarrels,
vain discussions, forums, debates and Weeks for Marxist Thought!
When the time comes to strike for your real liberation, strike
to kill. Words cannot kill. Do people want to discuss things with
you? Do they admire you? Spit in their faces. Do they make fun
of you? Help them recognize themselves in their mockery. Roles
are inherently ridiculous. Do you see nothing but roles around
you? Treat them to your nonchalance, to your dispassionate wit.
Play cat and mouse with them, and there is a good chance that
one or two people about you will wake up to themselves and discover
the prerequisites for real communication. Remember: all roles
alienate equally, but some are less despicable than others. The
range of stereotyped behaviour includes forms which barely conceal
lived experience and its alienated demands. To my mind, temporary
alliances are permissible with certain revolutionary images, to
the extent that a glimmer of radicalism shines through the ideological
screen which they presuppose. A case in point is the cult of Lumumba
among young Congolese revolutionaries. In any case, it is impossible
to go wrong so long as we never forget that the only proper treatment
for ourselves and for others is to make ever more radical demands.

People are bewitched into believing that time slips
away, and this belief is the basis of time actually slipping away.
Time is the work of attrition of that adaptation to which people
must resign themselves so long as they fail to change the world.
Age is a role, an acceleration of `lived' time on the plane of
appearances, an attachment to things.

The growth of civilization's discontents is now forcing every
branch of therapeutics towards a new demonology. Just as, formerly,
invocation, sorcery, possession, exorcism, black sabbaths, metamorphoses,
talismans and all the rest were bound up with the suspect capacity
for healing and hurting, so today (and more effectively) the apparatus
for offering consolation to the oppressed medicine, ideology,
compensatory roles, consumer gadgetry, movements for social change
serves the oppressor and the oppressor alone. The order of things
is sick: this is what our leaders would conceal at all costs.
In a fine passage of The Function of the Orgasm, Wilhelm Reich
relates how after long months of psychoanalytic treatment he managed
to cure a young Viennese working woman. She was suffering from
depression brought on by the conditions of her life and work.
When she was recovered Reich sent her back home. A fortnight later
she killed herself. Reich's intransigent honesty condemned him,
as everyone knows, to exclusion from the psychoanalytic establishment,
to isolation, delusion and death in prison: the duplicity of our
neodemonologists cannot be exposed with impunity.

Those who organize the world organize both suffering and the anaesthetics
for dealing with it; this much is common knowledge. Most people
live like sleepwalkers, torn between the gratification of neurosis
and the traumatic prospect of a return to real life. Things are
now reaching the point, however, where the maintenance of survival
calls for so many analgesics that the organism approaches saturation
point. But the magical analogy is more apt here than the medical:
practitioners of magic fully expect a backlash effect in such
circumstances, and we should expect the same. It is because of
the imminence of this upheaval that I compare the present conditioning
of human beings to a massive bewitchment.

Bewitching of this kind presupposes a spatial network which links
up the most distant objects sympathetically, according to specific
laws: formal analogy, organic coexistence, functional symmetry,
symbolic affiliation, etc. Such correspondences are established
through the infinitely frequent association of given forms of
behaviour with appropriate signals. In other words, through a
generalized system of conditioning. The present vogue for loudly
condemning the role of conditioning, propaganda, advertising and
the mass media in modern society may be assumed to be a form of
partial exorcism designed to reinforce a vaster and more essential
mystification by distracting attention from it. Outrage at the
gutter press goes hand in hand with subservience to the more elegant
lies of posh journalism. Media, language, time these are the giant
claws with which Power manipulates humanity and moulds it brutally
to its own perspective. These claws are not very adept, admittedly,
but their effectiveness is enormously increased by the fact that
people are not aware that they can resist them, and often do not
even know the extent to which they are already spontaneously doing
so.

Stalin's show trials proved that it only takes a little patience
and perseverance to get a man to accuse himself of every imaginable
crime and appear in public begging to be executed. Now that we
are aware of such techniques, and on our guard against them, how
can we fail to see that the set of mechanisms controlling us uses
the very same insidious persuasiveness though with more powerful
means at its disposal, and with greater persistence when it lays
down the law: ``You are weak, you must grow old, you must die.''
Consciousness acquiesces, and the body follows suit. I am fond
of a remark of Artaud's, though it must be set in a materialist
light: ``We do not die because we have to die: we die because
one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to
deem it necessary.''

Plants transplanted to an unfavourable soil die. Animals adapt
to their environment. Human beings transform theirs. Thus death
is not the same thing for plants, animals and humans. In favourable
soil, the plant lives like an animal: it can adapt. Where man
fails to change his surroundings, he too is in the situation of
an animal. Adaptation is the law of the animal world.

According to Hans Selye, the theoretician of `stress', the general
syndrome of adaptation has three phases: the alarm reaction, the
phase of resistance and the phase of exhaustion. In terms of real
life he is still at the level of animal adaptation: spontaneous
reactions in childhood, consolidation in maturity, exhaustion
in old age. And today, the harder people try to find salvation
in appearances, the more vigorously is it borne in upon them by
the ephemeral and inconsistent nature of the spectacle that they
live like dogs and die like bundles of hay. The day cannot be
far off when men will have to face the fact that the social organization
they have constructed to change the world according to their wishes
no longer serves this purpose. For all this organization amounts
to is a system of prohibitions preventing the creation of a higher
form of organization and the use therein of the techniques of
liberation and individual self-realization which have evolved
throughout the history of privative appropriation, of exploitation
of man by man, of hierarchical authority.

We live in a closed, suffocating system. Whatever we gain in one
sphere we lose in another. Death, for instance, though quantitatively
defeated by modern medicine, has re-emerged qualitatively on the
plane of survival. Adaptation has been democratized, made easier
for everyone, at the price of abandoning the essential project,
which is the adaptation of the world to human needs.

A struggle against death exists, of course, but it takes place
within the limits set by the adaptation syndrome: death is part
of the cure for death. Significantly, therapeutic efforts concentrate
mainly on the exhaustion phase, as though the main aim were to
extend the stage of resistance as far as possible into old age.
Thus the big guns are brought out only once the body is old and
weak, because, as Reich understood well, any all-out attack on
the attrition wreaked by the demands of adaptation would inevitably
mean a direct onslaught on social organization i.e., on that which
stands opposed to any transcendence of the principle of adaptation.
Partial cures are preferred because they leave the overall social
pathology untouched. But what will happen when the proliferation
of such partial cures ends up spreading the malaise of inauthenticity
to every corner of daily life? And when the essential role of
exorcism and bewitchment in the maintenance of a sick society
becomes plain for all to see?

* * *

The question ``How old are you?'' inevitably contains a reference
to power. Dates themselves serve to pigeonhole and circumscribe
us. Is not the passage of time always measured by reference to
the establishment of some authority or other in terms of the years
accumulated since the installation of a god, messiah, leader or
conquering city? To the aristocratic mind, moreover, such accumulated
time was a measure of authority: the prepotency of the lord was
increased both by his own age and by the antiquity of his lineage.
At his death the noble bequeathed a vitality to his heirs which
drew vigour from the past. By contrast, the bourgeoisie has no
past; or at any rate it recognizes none inasmuch as its fragmented
power no longer depends on any hereditary principle. The bourgeoisie
is thus reduced to aping the nobility: identification with forebears
is sought in nostalgic fashion via the photos in the family album;
identification with cyclical time, with the time of the eternal
return, is feebly emulated by blind identification with a staccato
succession of short spans of linear time.

This link between age and the starting-post of measurable time
is not the only thing which betrays age's kinship with power.
I am convinced that people's measured age is nothing but a role.
It involves a speeding up of lived time in the mode of non-life
on the plane, therefore, of appearances, and in accordance with
the dictates of adaptation. To acquire power is to acquire `age'.
In earlier times only the `aged' or `elders', those old either
in nobility or in experience, exercised power. Today even the
young enjoy the dubious privilege of age. In fact consumer society,
which invented the teenager as a new class of consumer, fosters
premature senility: to consume is to be consumed by inauthenticity,
nurturing appearance to the advantage of the spectacle and to
the detriment of real life. The consumer is killed by the things
he becomes attached to, because these things (commodities, roles)
are dead.

Whatever you possess possesses you in return. Everything that
makes you into an owner adapts you to the order of things makes
you old. Time-which-slips-away is what fills the void created
by the absence of the self. The harder you run after time, the
faster time goes: this is the law of consumption. Try to stop
it, and it will wear you out and age you all the more easily.
Time has to be caught on the wing, in the present but the present
has yet to be constructed.

We were born never to grow old, never to die. All we can hope
for, however, is an awareness of having come too soon. And a healthy
contempt for the future can at least ensure us a rich portion
of life.

Survival is life reduced to economic imperatives. In
the present period, therefore, survival is life reduced to what
can be consumed (seventeen). Reality is giving answers to the
problem of transcendence before our so-called revolutionaries
have even thought of formulating this problem. Whatever is not
transcended rots, and whatever is rotten cries out for transcendence.
Spurious opposition, being unaware of both these tendencies, speeds
up the process of decomposition while becoming an integral part
of it: it thus makes the task of transcendence easier but only
in the sense in which we sometimes say of a murdered man that
he made his murderer's task easier. Survival is non-transcendence
become unlivable. The mere rejection of survival dooms us to impotence.
We have to retrieve the core of radical demands which has repeatedly
been renounced by movements which started out as revolutionary
(eighteen).

Chapter 17

SURVIVAL SICKNESS

Capitalism has demystified survival. It has made the
poverty of daily life intolerable in view of the increasing wealth
of technical possibilities. Survival has become an economizing
on life. The civilization of collective survival increases the
dead time in individual lives to the point where the death forces
are liable to carry the day over collective survival itself. The
only hope is that the passion for destruction may be reconverted
into a passion for life.

Up until now people have merely complied with a system
of world transformation. Today the task is to make the system
comply with the transformation of the world.

The organization of human societies has changed the world, and
the world in changing has brought upheaval to the organization
of human societies. But if hierarchical organization seizes control
of nature, while itself undergoing transformation in the court
of this struggle, the portion of liberty and creativity falling
to the lot of the individual is drained away by the requirements
of adaptation to social norms of various kinds. This is true,
at any rate, so long as no generalized revolutionary moment occurs.

The time belonging to the individual in history is for the most
part dead time. Only a rather recent awakening of consciousness
has made this fact intolerable to us. For with its revolution
the bourgeoisie does two things. On the one hand, it proves that
people can accelerate world transformation, and that they can
improve their individual lives (where improvement is understood
in terms of accession to the ruling class, to riches, to capitalist
success). But at the same time the bourgeois order nullifies the
individual's freedom by interference; it increases the dead time
in daily life (imposing the need to produce, consume, calculate);
and it capitulates before the haphazard laws of the market, before
the inevitable cyclical crises with their burden of wars and misery,
and before the limitations invented by ``common sense'' (``You
can't change human nature,'' ``The poor will always be with us'',
etc.). The politics of the bourgeoisie, as of the bourgeoisie's
socialist heirs, is the politics of a driver pumping the brake
while the accelerator is jammed fast to the floor: the more the
speed increases, the more frenetic, perilous and useless become
the attempts to slow down. The helter-skelter pace of consumption
is set at once by the rate of the disintegration of Power and
by the imminence of the construction of a new order, a new dimension,
a parallel universe born of the collapse of the Old World.

The changeover from the aristocratic system of adaptation to the
``democratic'' one brutally widened the gap between the passivity
of individual submission and the social dynamism that transforms
nature the gap between people's powerlessness and the power of
new techniques. The contemplative attitude was perfectly suited
to the feudal system, to a virtually motionless world underpinned
by eternal gods. But the spirit of submission was hardly compatible
with the dynamic vision of merchants, manufacturers, bankers and
discoverers of riches -the vision of those acquainted not with
the revelation of the immutable, but rather with the shifting
economic world, the insatiable hunger for profit and the necessity
of constant innovation. Yet wherever the bourgeoisie's action
results in the popularization and valorization of the sense of
transience, the sense of hope, the bourgeoisie qua power seeks
to imprison people within this transitoriness. To replace the
old theology of stasis the bourgeoisie sets up a metaphysics of
motion. Although both these ideological systems hinder the movement
of reality, the earlier one does so more successfully and more
harmoniously than the second: the aristocratic scheme is more
consistent, more unified. For to place an ideology of change in
the service of what does not change creates a paradox which nothing
henceforward can either conceal from consciousness or justify
to consciousness. Thus in our universe of expanding technology
and comfort we see people turning in upon themselves, shrivelling
up, living trivial lives and dying for details. It is a nightmare
where we are promised absolute freedom but granted a miserable
square inch of individual autonomy -a square inch, moreover, that
is strictly policed by our neighbours. A space-time of pettiness
and mean thoughts.

Before the bourgeois revolution, the possibility of death in a
living God lent everyday life an illusory dimension which aspired
to the fullness of a multifaceted reality. You might say that
humanity has never come closer to self-realization while yet confined
to the realm of the inauthentic. But what is one to say of a life
lived out in the shadow of a God that is dead: the decomposing
God of fragmented power? The bourgeoisie has dispensed with a
God by economizing on people's lives. It has also made the economic
sphere into a sacred imperative and life into an economic system.
This is the model that our future programmers are preparing to
rationalize, to submit to proper planning -in a word, to ``humanize.''
And, never fear, they will be no less irresponsible than the corpse
of God.

Kierkegaard describes survival sickness well: ``Let others bemoan
the maliciousness of their age. What irks me is its pettiness,
for ours is an age without passion...My life comes out all one
colour." Survival is life reduced to bare essentials, to
life's abstract form, to the minimum of activity required to ensure
people's participation in production and consumption. The entitlement
of a Roman slave was rest and sustenance. As beneficiaries of
the Rights of Man we receive the wherewithal to nourish and cultivate
ourselves, enough consciousness to play a role, enough initiative
to acquire power and enough passivity to flaunt Power's insignia.
Our freedom is the freedom to adapt after the fashion of higher
animals.

Survival is life in slow motion. How much energy it takes to remain
on the level of appearances! The media gives wide currency to
a whole personal hygiene of survival: avoid strong emotions, watch
your blood pressure, eat less, drink in moderation only, survive
in good health so that you can continue playing your role. ``Overwork:
the executive's disease,'' said a recent headline in Le Monde.
We must be economical with survival for it wears us down; we have
to live it as little as possible for it belongs to death. In former
times one died a live death, one quickened by the presence of
God. Today our respect for life prohibits us from touching it,
reviving it or snapping it out of its lethargy. We die of inertia,
whenever the charge of death that we carry with us reaches saturation
point. Unfortunately there is no branch of science that can measure
the intensity of the deadly radiation that kills our daily actions.
In the end, by dint of identifying ourselves with what we are
not, of switching from one role to another, from one authority
to another, and from one age to another, how can we avoid becoming
ourselves part of that never-ending state of transition which
is the process of decomposition?

The presence within life itself of a mysterious yet tangible death
so misled Freud that he postulated an ontological curse in the
shape of a ``death instinct.'' This mistake of Freud's, which
Reich had already pointed out, has now been clarified by the phenomenon
of consumption. The three aspects of the death instinct -Nirvana,
the repetition compulsion and masochism -have turned out to be
simply three styles of domination: constraint passively accepted,
seduction through conformity to custom, and mediation perceived
as an ineluctable law.

As we know, the consumption of goods -which comes down always,
in the present state of things, to the consumption of power -carries
within itself the seeds of its own destruction and the conditions
of its own transcendence. The consumer cannot and must not ever
attain satisfaction: the logic of the consumable object demands
the creation of fresh needs, yet the accumulation of such false
needs exacerbates the malaise of people confined with increasing
difficulty solely to the status of consumers. Furthermore, the
wealth of consumer goods impoverishes authentic life. It does
so in two ways. First, it replaces authentic life with things.
Secondly, it makes it impossible, with the best will in the world,
to become attached to these things, precisely because they have
to be consumed, i.e., destroyed. Whence an absence of life which
is ever more frustrating, a self-devouring dissatisfaction. This
need to live is ambivalent: it constitutes one of those points
where perspective is reversed.

In the consumer's manipulated view of things -the view of conditioning
-the lack of life appears as insufficient consumption of power
and insufficient self-consumption in the service of power. As
a palliative to the absence of real life we are offered death
on an instalment plan. A world that condemns us to a bloodless
death is naturally obliged to propagate the taste for blood. Where
survival sickness reigns, the desire to live lays hold spontaneously
of the weapons of death: senseless murder and sadism flourish.
For passion destroyed is reborn in the passion for destruction.
If these conditions persist, no one will survive the era of survival.
Already the despair is so great that many people would go along
with the Antonin Artaud who said: "l bear the stigma of an
insistent death that strips real death of all terror for me."

The individual of survival is inhabited by pleasure-anxiety, by
unfulfillment: a mutilated person. Where is one to find oneself
in the endless self-loss into which everything draws one? They
are wanderers in a labyrinth with no centre, a maze full of mazes.
Theirs is a world of equivalents. Should one kill oneself? Killing
oneself, though, implies some sense of resistance: one must possess
a value that one can destroy. Where there is nothing, the destructive
actions themselves crumble to nothing. You cannot hurl a void
into a void. ``If only a rock would fall and kill me,'' wrote
Kierkegaard, ``at least that would be an expedient.'' I doubt
if there is anyone today who has not been touched by the horror
of a thought such as that. Inertia is the surest killer, t he
inertia of people who settle for senility at eighteen, plunging
eight hours a day into degrading work and feeding on ideologies.
Beneath the miserable tinsel of the spectacle there are only gaunt
figures yearning for, yet dreading, Kierkegaard's ``expedient,''
so that they might never again have to desire what they dread
and dread what they desire.

At the same time the passion for life emerges as a biological
need, the reverse side of the passion for destroying and letting
oneself be destroyed. ``So long as we have not managed to abolish
any of the causes of human despair we have no right to try and
abolish the means whereby people attempt to get rid of despair.''
The fact is that people possess both the means to eliminate the
causes of despair and the power to mobilize these means in order
to rid themselves of it. No one has the right to ignore the fact
that the sway of conditioning accustoms them to survive on one
hundredth of their potential for life. So general is survival
sickness that the slightest concentration of lived experience
could not fail to unite the largest number of people in a common
will to live. The negation of despair would of necessity become
the construction of a new life. The rejection of economic logic
(which only economizes on life) would of necessity entail the
death of economics and carry us beyond the realm of survival.

Survival is life reduced to economic imperatives. In
the present period, therefore, survival is life reduced to what
can be consumed (seventeen). Reality is giving answers to the
problem of transcendence before our so-called revolutionaries
have even thought of formulating this problem. Whatever is not
transcended rots, and whatever is rotten cries out for transcendence.
Spurious opposition, being unaware of both these tendencies, speeds
up the process of decomposition while becoming an integral part
of it: it thus makes the task of transcendence easier but only
in the sense in which we sometimes say of a murdered man that
he made his murderer's task easier. Survival is non-transcendence
become unlivable. The mere rejection of survival dooms us to impotence.
We have to retrieve the core of radical demands which has repeatedly
been renounced by movements which started out as revolutionary
(eighteen). There comes a moment of transcendence that is historically
defined by the strength and weakness of Power; by the fragmentation
of the individual to the point where he or she is a mere monad
of subjectivity; and by the intimacy between everyday life and
that which destroys it. This transcendence will be general, undivided
and built by subjectivity (1). Once they abandon their initial
extremism, revolutionary elements become irremediably reformist.
The well-nigh general abandonment of the revolutionary spirit
in our time is a soil in which reformisms of survival thrive.
Any modern revolutionary organization must identify the seeds
of transcendence in the great movements of the past. In particular,
it must rediscover and carry through the project of individual
freedom, perverted by liberalism; the project of collective freedom,
perverted by socialism; the project of the recapture of nature,
perverted by fascism; and the project of the whole person, perverted
by Marxist ideologies. This last project, though expressed in
the theological terms of the time, also informed the great medieval
heresies and their anticlerical rage, the recent exhumation of
which is so apt in our own century with its new clergy of ``experts''
(2). People of ressentiment are the perfect survivors people bereft
of the consciousness of possible transcendence, people of the
age of decomposition (3). By becoming aware of spectacular decomposition,
a person of ressentiment becomes a nihilist. Active nihilism is
prerevolutionary. There is no consciousness of transcendence without
consciousness of decomposition. Juvenile delinquents are the legitimate
heirs of Dada (4).

1.

The question of transcendence. Refusal is multiform; transcendence
is one. Faced by modern discontent and incited by it to bear witness,
human history is quite simply the history of a radical refusal
which invariably carries transcendence within itself, which invariably
tends towards self-negation. Although only one or two aspects
of this refusal are ever seen at a time, this can never successfully
conceal the basic identity of dictatorship by God, monarch, chief,
class or organization. What idiocy it is to evoke an ontology
of revolt. By transforming natural alienation into social alienation,
the movement of history teaches us freedom in servitude: it teaches
us both revolt and submission. Revolt has less need of metaphysicians
than metaphysicians have of revolt. Hierarchical power, which
has been with us for millennia, furnishes a perfectly adequate
explanation for the permanence of rebellion, as it does of the
repression that smashes rebellion.

The overthrow of feudalism and the creation of masters without
slaves are one and the same project. The memory of the partial
failure of this project in the French Revolution has continued
to render it more familiar and more attractive, even as later
revolutions, each in their own way abortive (the Paris Commune,
the Bolshevik Revolution), have at once clarified the project's
contours and deferred its enactment.

All philosophies of history without exception collude with this
failure, which is why consciousness of history cannot be divorced
from consciousness of the necessity of transcendence.

How is it that the moment of transcendence is increasingly easy
to discern on the social horizon? The question of transcendence
is a tactical question. Broadly, we may outline it as follows:

1 a) Anything that does not kill power reinforces it, but anything
which power does not itself kill weakens power.

b) The more the requirements of consumption come to supersede
the requirements of production, the more government by constraint
gives way to government by seduction.

c) With the democratic extension of the right to consume comes
a corresponding extension to the largest group of people of the
right to exercise authority (in varying degrees, of course).

d) As soon as people fall under the spell of Authority they are
weakened and their capacity for refusal withers. Power is thus
reinforced, it is true, yet it is also reduced to the level of
the consumable and is indeed consumed, dissipated and, of necessity,
becomes vulnerable.

The point of transcendence is one moment in this dialectic of
strength and weakness. While it is undoubtedly the task of radical
criticism to identify this moment and to work tactically to precipitate
it, we must not forget that it is the facts all around us that
call such radical criticism forth. Transcendence sits astride
a contradiction that haunts the modern world, permeating the daily
news and leaving its stamp on most of our behaviour. This is the
contradiction between impotent refusal i.e., reformism and wild
refusal, or nihilism (two types of which, the active and the passive,
are to be distinguished).

2) The diffusion of hierarchical power may broaden that power's
realm but it also tarnishes its glamour. Fewer people live on
the fringes of society as bums and parasites, yet at the same
time fewer people actually respect an employer, a monarch, a leader
or a role; although more people survive within the social organization,
many more of the people within it hold it in contempt. Everyone
finds themself at the center of the struggle in their daily life.
This has two consequences:

a) In the first place, the individual is not only the victim of
social atomization, he or she is also the victim of fragmented
power. Now that subjectivity has emerged onto the historical stage,
only to come immediately under attack, it has become the most
crucial revolutionary demand. Henceforward the construction of
a harmonious collectivity will require a revolutionary theory
founded not on communitarianism but rather upon subjectivity a
theory founded, in other words, on individual cases, on the lived
experience of individuals.

b) Secondly, the extreme fragmentariness of resistance and refusal
turns, ironically, into its opposite, for it recreates the preconditions
for a global refusal. The new revolutionary collective will come
into being through a chain reaction leaping from one subjectivity
to the next. The construction of a community of people who are
whole individuals will inaugurate the reversal of perspective
without which no transcendence is possible.

3) A final point is that the idea of a reversal of perspective
is invading popular consciousness. For everyone is too close for
comfort to that which negates them. This proximity to death makes
the life forces rebel. Just as the allure of faraway places fades
when one gets closer, so perspective vanishes as the eye gets
too near. By locking people up in its decor of things, and by
its clumsy attempt to insinuate itself into people themselves,
all Power manages to do is to spread the discontent and disaffection.
Vision and thought get muddled, values blur, forms become vague,
and anamorphic distortions trouble us rather as though we were
looking at a painting with our nose pressed hard against the canvas.
Incidentally, the change in pictorial perspective (Uccello, Kandinsky)
coincided with a change of perspective at the level of social
life. The rhythm of consumption thrusts the mind into that interregnum
where far and near are indistinguishable. The facts themselves
will soon come to the aid of the mass of humanity in their struggle
to enter at long last that state of freedom aspired to though
they lacked the means of attaining it by those Swabian heretics
of 1270 mentioned by Norman Cohn in his Pursuit of the Millennium,
who ``said that they had mounted up above God and, reaching the
very pinnacle of Divinity, abandoned God. Often the adept would
affirm that he or she had no longer `any need of God.'''

2.

The renunciation of poverty and the poverty of renunciation. Almost
every revolutionary movement embodies the desire for complete
change, yet up to now almost every revolutionary movement has
succeeded only in changing some detail. As soon as the people
in arms renounces its own will and starts kow-towing to the will
of its counsellors it loses control of its freedom and confers
the ambiguous title of revolutionary leader upon its oppressors-to-be.
This is the ``cunning'', so to speak, of fragmentary power: it
gives rise to fragmentary revolutions, revolutions dissociated
from any reversal of perspective, cut off from the totality, paradoxically
detached from the proletariat which makes them. There is no mystery
in the fact that a totalitarian regime is the price paid when
the demand for total freedom is renounced once a handful of partial
freedoms has been won. How could it be otherwise! People talk
in this connection of a fatality, a curse: the revolution devouring
its children, and so on. As though Makhno's defeat, the crushing
of Kronstadt revolt, or Durruti's assassination were not already
writ large in the structure of the original Bolshevik cells, perhaps
even in Marx's authoritarian positions in the First International.
``Historical necessity'' and ``reasons of state'' are simply the
necessity and the reasons of leaders who have to legitimate their
renunciation of the revolutionary project, their renunciation
of extremism.

Renunciation equals non-transcendence. And issue-politics, partial
refusal and piecemeal demands are the very thing that blocks transcendence.
The worst inhumanity is never anything but a wish for emancipation
that has settled for compromise and fossilized beneath the strata
of successive sacrifices. Liberalism, socialism and Bolshevism
have each built new prisons under the sign of liberty. The left
fights for an increase in comfort within alienation, skillfully
furthering this impoverished aim by evoking the barricades, the
red flag and the finest revolutionary moments of the past. In
this way once-radical impulses are doubly betrayed, twice renounced:
first they are ossified, then dug up and used as a carrot. ``Revolution''
is doing pretty well everywhere: worker-priests, priest-junkies,
communist generals, red potentates, trade unionists on the board
of directors.... Radical chic harmonizes perfectly with a society
that can sell Watney's Red Barrel beer under the slogan ``The
Red Revolution is Coming.'' Not that all this is without risk
for the system. The endless caricaturing of the most deeply felt
revolutionary desires can produce a backlash in the shape of a
resurgence of such feelings, purified in reaction to their universal
prostitution. There is no such thing as lost allusions.

The new wave of insurrection tends to rally young people who have
remained outside specialized politics, whether right or left,
or who have passed briefly through these spheres because of excusable
errors of judgement, or ignorance. All currents merge in the tide
race of nihilism. The only important thing is what lies beyond
this confusion. The revolution of daily life will be the work
of those who, with varying degrees of facility, are able to recognize
the seeds of total self-realization preserved, contradicted and
dissimulated within ideologies of every kind and who cease consequently
to be either mystified or mystifiers.

***

If a spirit of revolt once existed within Christianity, I defy
anybody who still calls himself a Christian to understand that
spirit. Such people have neither the right nor the capacity to
inherit the heretical tradition. Today heresy is an impossibility.
The theological language used to express the impulses of so many
fine revolts was the mark of a particular period; it was the only
language then available, and nothing more than that. Translation
is now necessary not that it presents any difficulties. Setting
aside the period in which I live, and the objective assistance
it gives me, how can I hope to improve in the twentieth century
on what the Brethren of the Free Spirit said in the thirteenth:
``A man may be so much one with God that whatever he does he cannot
sin. I am part of the freedom of Nature and I satisfy all my natural
desires. The free man is perfectly right to do whatever gives
him pleasure. Better that the whole world be destroyed and perish
utterly than that a free man should abstain from a single act
to which his nature moves him.'' One cannot but admire Johann
Hartmann's ``The truly free man is lord and master of all creatures.
All things belong to him, and he is entitled to make use of whichever
pleases him. If someone tries to stop him doing so, the free man
has the right to kill him and take his possessions.'' The same
goes for John of Brunn, who justifies his practice of fraud, plunder
and armed robbery by announcing that ``All things created by God
are common property. Whatever the eye sees and covets, let the
hand grasp it.'' Or again, consider the Pifles d'Arnold and their
conviction that they were so pure that they were incapable of
sinning no matter what they did (1157). Such jewels of the Christian
spirit always sparkled a little too brightly for the bleary eyes
of the Christians. The great heretical tradition may still be
discerned dimly perhaps, but with its dignity still intact in
the acts of a Pauwels leaving a bomb in the church of La Madeleine
(March 15, 1894), or of the young Robert Burger slitting a priest's
throat (August 11, 1963). The last and the last possible instances
of priests retrieving something genuine from a real attachment
to the revolutionary origins of Christianity are furnished in
my opinion by Meslier and Jacques Roux fomenting jacquerie and
riot. Not that we can expect this to be understood by the sectarians
of today's ecumenizing forces. These emanate from Moscow as readily
as from Rome, and their evangelists are cybernetician scum as
often as creatures of Opus Dei. Such being the new clergy, the
way to transcend heresy should not be hard to divine.

***

No one is about to deny liberalism full credit for having spread
the thirst for freedom to every corner of the world. Freedom of
the press, freedom of thought, freedom of creation if all their
``freedoms'' have no other merit, at least they stand as a monument
to liberalism's falseness. The most eloquent of epitaphs, in fact:
after all, it is no mean feat to imprison liberty in the name
of liberty. In the liberal system, the freedom of individuals
is destroyed by mutual interference: one person's liberty begins
where the other's ends. Those who reject this basic principle
are destroyed by the sword; those who accept it are destroyed
by justice. Nobody gets their hands dirty: a button is pressed,
and the guillotine of the police and state intervention falls.
A very fortunate business, to be sure. The State is the bad conscience
of the liberal, the instrument of a necessary repression for which
deep in their heart they deny responsibility. As for day-to-day
business, it is left to the freedom of the capitalists to keep
the freedom of the worker within proper bounds. Here, however,
the upstanding socialist comes on the scene to denounce this hypocrisy.

What is socialism? It is a way of getting liberalism out of its
contradiction, i.e., the fact that it simultaneously safeguards
and destroys individual freedom. Socialism proposes (and there
could be no more worthy goal) to prevent individuals from negating
each other through interference. The solution it actually produces,
however, is very different. For it ends up eliminating interferences
without liberating the individual; what is much worse, it melds
the individual will into a collective mediocrity. Admittedly,
only the economic sphere is affected by the institution of socialism,
and opportunism i.e., liberalism in the sphere of daily life is
scarcely incompatible with bureaucratic planning of all activities
from above, with manoeuvering for promotion, with power struggles
between leaders, etc. Thus socialism, by abolishing economic competition
and free enterprise, puts an end to interference on one level,
but it retains the race for the consumption of power as the only
authorized form of freedom. The partisans of self-limiting freedom
are split into two camps, therefore: those who are for liberalism
in production and those who are for liberalism in consumption.
And a fat lot of difference there is between them!

The contradiction in socialism between radicalism and its renunciation
is well exemplified by two statements recorded in the minutes
of the debates of the First International. In 1867 we find Chémalé
reminding his listeners that ``The product must be exchanged for
another product of equal value; anything less amounts to trickery,
to fraud, to robbery.'' According to Chémalé, therefore,
the problem is how to rationalize exchange, how to make it fair.
The task of socialism, on this view, is to correct capitalism,
to give it a human face, to plan it, and to empty it of its substance
(profit). And who profits from the end of capitalism? This we
have found out since 1867. But there was already another view
of socialism, coexistent with this one, and we find it expressed
by Varlin, Communard-to-be, at the Geneva Congress of this same
International Association of Workingmen in 1866: ``So long as
anything stands in the way of the employment of oneself freedom
will not exist.'' There is thus a freedom locked up in socialism,
but nothing could be more foolhardy than to try and release this
freedom today without declaring total war on socialism itself.

Is there any need to expatiate on the abandonment of the Marxist
project by every variety of present-day Marxism? The Soviet Union,
China, Cuba: what is there here of the construction of the whole
man? The material poverty which fed the revolutionary desire for
transcendence and radical change has been attenuated, but a new
poverty has emerged, a poverty born of renunciation and compromise.
The renunciation of poverty has led only to the poverty of renunciation.
Was it not the feeling that he had allowed his initial project
to be fragmented and effected in piecemeal fashion that occasioned
Marx's disgusted remark, ``l am not a Marxist''? Even the
obscenity of fascism springs from a will to live but a will to
live denied, turned against itself like an ingrowing toenail.
A will to live become a will to power, a will to power become
a will to passive obedience, a will to passive obedience become
a death wish. For when it comes to the qualitative sphere, to
concede a fraction is to give up everything.

By all means, let us destroy fascism, but let the same destructive
flame consume all ideologies, and all their lackeys to boot.

***

Through force of circumstance, poetic energy is everywhere renounced
or allowed to go to seed. Isolated people abandon their individual
will, their subjectivity, in an attempt to break out. Their reward
is the illusion of community and an intenser affection for death.
Renunciation is the first step towards a man's co-optation by
the mechanisms of Power.

There is no such thing as a technique or thought which does not
arise in the first instance from a will to live; in the official
world, however, there is no such thing as a technique or thought
which does not lead us towards death. The faces of past renunciations
are the data of a history still largely unknown to us. The study
of these traces helps in itself to forge the arms of total transcendence.
Where is the radical core, the qualitative dimension? This question
has the power to shatter habits of mind and habits of life; and
it has a part to play in the strategy of transcendence, in the
building of new networks of radical resistance. It may be applied
to philosophy, where ontology bears witness to the renunciation
of being-as-becoming. It may be applied to psychoanalysis, a technique
of liberation which confines itself for the most part to ``liberating''
us from the need to attack social organization. It may be applied
to all the dreams and desires stolen, violated and twisted beyond
recognition by conditioning. To the basically radical nature of
our spontaneous acts, so often denied by our stated view of ourselves
and of the world. To the playful impulse, whose present imprisonment
in the categories of permitted games from roulette to war, by
way of lynching parties leaves no place for the authentic game
of playing with each moment of daily life. And to love, so inseparable
from revolution, and so largely cut off, as things stand, from
the pleasure of giving.

Remove the qualitative and all that remains is despair. Despair
comes in every variety available to a system designed for killing
human beings, the system of hierarchical power: reformism, fascism,
philistine politicism, mediocracy, activism and passivity, boyscoutism
and ideological masturbation. A friend of Joyce's recalls: ``l
don't remember Joyce ever saying a word during all those years
about Poincaré, Roosevelt, de Valera, Stalin; never so
much as a mention of Geneva or Locarno, Abyssinia, Spain, China,
Japan, the Prince affair, Violette Nozière....'' What,
indeed, could he have added to Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake? Once
the Capital of individual creativity had been written, it only
remained for the Leopold Blooms of the world to unite, to throw
off their miserable survival and to actualize the richness and
diversity of their ``interior monologues'' in the lived reality
of their existence. Joyce was never a comrade-in-arms to Durruti;
he fought shoulder to shoulder with neither the Asturians nor
the Viennese workers. But he had the decency to pass no comment
on news items, to the anonymity of which he abandoned Ulysses
that ``monument of culture,'' as one critic put it while at the
same time abandoning himself, Joyce, the man of total subjectivity.
To the spinelessness of the man of letters, Ulysses is witness.
As to the spinelessness of renunciation, its witness is invariably
the ``forgotten'' radical moment.

Thus revolutions and counterrevolutions follow hard upon one another's
heels, sometimes within a twenty-four hour period in the space,
even, of the least eventful of days. But consciousness of the
radical act and of its renunciation becomes more widespread and
more discriminating all the time. Inevitably. For today survival
is non-transcendence become unliveable.

3.

The individual of ressentiment. The more power is dispensed in
consumer size packs, the more circumscribed becomes the sphere
of survival, until we enter that reptilian world in which pleasure,
the effort of liberation and agony all find expression in a single
shudder. Low thought and short sight have long signalled the fact
that the bourgeoisie belongs to a civilization of troglodytes
in the making, a civilization of survival perfectly epitomized
by the invention of the fallout shelter complete with all modern
conveniences. The greatness of the bourgeoisie is a borrowed cloak:
unable to build truly on the back of its defeated opponent, it
donned feudal robes only to find itself draped in a pale shadow
of feudal virtue, of God, of nature, etc. No sooner had it discovered
its incapacity to control these entities directly than it fell
to internal squabbling over details, involuntarily dealing itself
blow after blow though never, it is true, a mortal one.

The same Flaubert who flays the bourgeois with ridicule calls
them to arms to put down the Paris Commune....

The nobility turns the bourgeois into an aggressor: the proletariat
puts it on the defensive. What does the proletariat represent
for the bourgeoisie? Not a true adversary: at the most a guilty
conscience that it desperately tries to conceal. Withdrawn, seeking
a position of minimum exposure to attack, proclaiming that reform
is the only legitimate form of change, the bourgeoisie clothes
its fragmented revolutions in a cloth of wary envy and resentment.

I have already said that in my view no insurrection is ever fragmentary
in its initial impulses, that it only becomes so when the poetry
of agitators and ringleaders gives way to authoritarian leadership.
The individual of ressentiment is the official world's travesty
of a revolutionary: an individual bereft of awareness of the possibility
of transcendence; a person who cannot grasp the necessity for
a reversal of perspective and who, gnawed by envy, spite and despair,
tries to use these feelings as weapons against a world so well
designed for his or her oppression. An isolated person. A reformist
pinioned between total refusal and absolute acceptance of Power.
They reject hierarchy out of umbrage at not having a place therein,
and this makes them, as rebels, ideal slaves to the designs of
revolutionary ``leaders''. Power has no better buttress than thwarted
ambition, which is why it makes every effort to console losers
in the rat race by flinging them the privileged as a target for
their rancour.

Short of a reversal in perspective, therefore, hatred of power
is merely another form of obeisance to Power's ascendancy. The
person who walks under a ladder to prove their freedom from superstition
proves just the opposite. Obsessive hatred and the insatiable
thirst for positions of authority wear down and impoverish people
to the same degree though perhaps not in the same way, for there
is, after all, more humanity in fighting against Power than in
prostituting oneself to it. There is in fact a world of difference
between struggling to live and struggling not to die. Revolts
within the realm of survival are measured by the yardstick of
death, which explains why they always require self-abnegation
on the part of their militants, and the a priori renunciation
of that will to live for which everyone is in reality struggling.

The rebel with no other horizon than a wall of restraints either
rams their head against this wall or ends up defending it with
dogged stupidity. No matter whether one accepts or rejects Power,
to see oneself in the light of constraints is to see things from
Power's point of view. Here we have humanity at the vanishing
point swarming with vermin, in Rosanov's words. Hemmed in on all
sides, they resist any kind of intrusion and mount a jealous guard
over themselves, never realizing that they have become sterile,
that they are keeping vigil over a graveyard. They have internalized
their own lack of existence. Worse, they borrow Power's impotence
in order to fight Power; such is the zeal with which they apply
the principle of fair play. Alongside such sacrifice, the price
they pay for purity for playing at being pure is small indeed.
How the most compromised people love to give themselves credit
for integrity out of all proportion to the odd minor points over
which they have preserved any! They get on their high horses because
they refused a promotion in the army, gave out a few leaflets
at a factory gate or got hit on the head by a cop. And all their
bragging goes hand in hand with the most obtuse militantism in
some communist party or other.

Once in a while, too, an individual at the vanishing point takes
it into their head that they have a world to conquer, that they
need more Lebensraum, a vaster ruin in which to engulf themself.
The rejection of Power easily comes to embrace the rejection of
those things which Power has appropriated e.g., the rebel's own
self. Defining oneself negatively by reference to Power's constraints
and lies can result in constraints and lies entering the mind
as an element of travestied revolt generally without so much as
a dash of irony to give a breath of air. No chain is harder to
break than the one which the individual attaches to themself when
their rebelliousness is lost to them in this way. When they place
their freedom in the service of unfreedom, the resulting increase
in unfreedom's strength enslaves them. Now, it may well be that
nothing resembles unfreedom so much as the effort to attain freedom,
but unfreedom has this distinguishing mark: once bought, it loses
all its value. even though its price is every bit as high as freedom's.

The wails close in and we can't breath. The more people struggle
for breath, the worse it gets. The ambiguity of the signs of life
and freedom, which oscillate between their positive and negative
forms according to the necessary conditions imposed by global
oppression, tends to generalize a confusion in which one hand
is constantly undoing the work of the other. Inability to apprehend
oneself encourages people to apprehend others on the basis of
their negative representations, on the basis of their roles and
thus to treat them as objects. Old bachelors, bureaucrats all,
in fact, who thrive on survival have no affective knowledge of
any other reason for existing. Needless to say, Power's best hopes
of co-optation lie precisely in this shared malaise. And the greater
the mental confusion, the greater its chances.

Myopia and voyeurism are the twin prerequisites of humanity's
adaptation to the social mediocrity of the age. Look at the world
through a keyhole! This is what all the experts urge us to do,
and what the individual of ressentiment delights in doing. Unable
to play a leading part, they rush to get the best seat in the
auditorium. They are desperately in need of minute platitudes
to chew on: all politicians are crooks, de Gaulle is a great man,
China is a workers' paradise, etc. They love to hate an individualized
oppressor, to love a flesh-and-blood Uncle Joe: systems are too
complicated for them. How easy it is to understand the success
of such crass images as the foul Jew, the shiftless native or
the two hundred families! Give the enemy a face and immediately
the countenance of the masses apes another most admirable face,
the face of the Defender of the Fatherland, Ruler, Fuhrer.

The individual of ressentiment is a potential revolutionary, but
the development of this potentiality entails passing through a
phase of larval consciousness: to first become a nihilist. If
they do not kill the organizers of their ennui, or at least those
people who appear as such in the forefront of their vision (managers,
experts, ideologues, etc.), then they will end up killing in the
name of an authority, in the name of some reason of state, or
in the name of ideological consumption. And if the state of things
does not eventually provoke a violent explosion, they will continue
to flounder in a sea of roles, locked in the tedious rigidity
of their spite, spreading their saw-toothed conformism everywhere
and applauding revolt and repression alike; for, in this eventuality,
incurable confusion is their only possible fate.

4

The nihilist. Rozanov's definition of nihilism is the best: ``The
show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to
collect their coats and go home. They turn round...No more coats
and no more home.''

Nihilism is born of the collapse of myth. During those periods
when the contradiction between mythical explanation Heaven, Redemption,
the Will of Allah and everyday life becomes patent, all values
are sucked into the vortex and destroyed. Deprived of any justification,
stripped of the illusions that concealed it, the weakness of humanity
emerges in all its nakedness. On the other hand, once myth no
longer justifies the ways of Power to us, the real possibilities
of social action and experiment appear. Myth was not just a cloak
for this weakness: it was also the cause of it. Thus the explosion
of myth frees an energy and creativity too long syphoned away
from authentic experience into religious transcendence and abstraction.
The interregnum between the collapse of classical philosophy and
the erection of the Christian myth saw an unprecedented effervescence
of thought and action. A thousand life-styles blossomed. Then
came the dead hand of Rome, co-opting whatever it could not destroy
utterly. Later, in the sixteenth century, the Christian myth itself
disintegrated, and another period of frenetic experimentation
burst upon the world. Nothing was true anymore, and everything
had become possible. Gilles de Rais tortured a thousand children
to death, and the revolutionary peasants of 1535 set about building
heaven on earth. But this new period of dissolution differed in
one important respect from all previous ones, for after 1789 the
reconstruction of a new myth became an absolute impossibility.

Christianity neutered the explosive nihilism of certain gnostic
sects, and improvised a protective garment for itself from their
remains. But the establishment of the bourgeois world made any
new displacement of nihilistic energy on to the plane of myth
impossible: the nihilism generated by the bourgeois revolution
was a concrete nihilism. The reality of exchange, as we have seen,
precludes all dissimulation. Until its abolition, the spectacle
can never be anything except the spectacle of nihilism. That vanity
of the world which the Pascal of the Pensées evoked, as
he thought, to the greater glory of God, turned out to be a product
of historical reality and this in the absence of God, himself
a casualty of the explosion of myth. Nihilism swept everything
before it, God included.

For the last century and a half, the most lucid contributions
to art and life have been the fruit of free experiment in the
field of abolished values. De Sade's passionate rationalism, Kierkegaard's
sarcasm, Nietszche's vacillating irony, Maldoror's violence, Mallarmé's
icy dispassion, Jarry's Umour, Dada's negativism these are the
forces which have reached out to confront people with some of
the dankness and acridity of decaying values. And also, with the
desire for a reversal of perspective, the need to discover alternative
forms of life the area which Melville called, ``that wild whaling
life where individual notabilities make up all totalities.'' Paradox:

a) The great propagators of nihilism lacked an essential weapon:
the sense of historic reality, the sense of the reality of decay,
erosion, fragmentation.

b) Those who have made history in the period of bourgeois decline
have been tragically lacking in any acute awareness of the immense
dissolvent power of history in this period. Marx failed to analyze
Romanticism and the artistic phenomenon in general. Lenin was
wilfully blind to the importance of everyday life and its degeneration,
of the Futurists, of Mayakovsky, or of the Dadaists.

Nihilism and historical consciousness have yet to join forces:
Marx smashing something better than the street lamps in Kentish
Town; Mallarmé with fire in his belly. The gap between
these two forces is an open door to the hordes of passive liquidators,
nihilists of the official world doggedly destroying the already
dead values they pretend to believe in. How long must we bear
the hegemony of these communist bureaucrats, fascist brutes, opinion
makers, pockmarked politicians, sub-Joycean writers, neo-Dadaist
thinkers all preaching the fragmentary, all working assiduously
for the Big Sleep and justifying themselves in the name of one
Order or another: the family, morality, culture, the flag, the
space race, margarine, etc. Perhaps nihilism could not have attained
the status of platitude if history had not advanced so far. But
advanced it has. Nihilism is a self-destruct mechanism: today
a flame, tomorrow ashes. The old values in ruins today feed the
intensive production of consumable and ``futurized'' values sold
under the old label of ``the modern''; but they also thrust us
inevitably towards a future yet to be constructed, towards the
transcendence of nihilism. In the consciousness of the new generation
a slow reconciliation is occurring between history's destructive
and constructive tendencies. The alliance of nihilism and transcendence
means that transcendence will be total. Here lies the only wealth
to be found in the affluent society.

When the individual of ressentiment becomes aware of the dead
loss which is survival, they turn into a nihilist. They embrace
the impossibility of living so tightly that even survival becomes
impossible. Once you are in that void, everything breaks up. The
horrors. Past and future explode; the present is ground zero.
And from ground zero there are only two ways out, two kinds of
nihilism: active and passive.

***

The passive nihilist compromises with his own lucidity about the
collapse of all values. They make one final nihilistic gesture:
throw a dice to decide their ``cause'', and become its devoted
slave, for Art's sake, and for the sake of a little bread....
Nothing is true, so a few gestures become hip. Joe Soap intellectuals,
pataphysicians, crypto-fascists, aesthetes of the acte gratuit,
mercenaries, Kim Philbys, pop-artists, psychedelic impresarios
bandwagon after bandwagon works out its own version of the credo
quia absurdum est: you don't believe in it, but you do it anyway;
you get used to it and you even get to like it in the end. Passive
nihilism is an overture to conformism.

After all, nihilism can never be more than a transition, a shifting,
ill-defined sphere, a period of wavering between two extremes,
one leading to submission and subservience, the other to permanent
revolt. Between the two poles stretches a no-man's-land, the wasteland
of the suicide and the solitary killer, of the criminal described
so aptly by Bettina as the crime of the State. Jack the Ripper
is essentially inaccessible. The mechanisms of hierarchical power
cannot touch him; he cannot be touched by revolutionary will.
He gravitates round that zero-point beyond which destruction,
instead of reinforcing the destruction wrought by power, beats
it at its own game, excites it to such violence that the machine
of the Penal Colony, stabbing wildly, shatters into pieces and
flies apart. Maldoror takes the disintegration of contemporary
social organization to its logical conclusion: to the stage of
its self-destruction. The individual's absolute rejection of society
as a response to society's absolute rejection of the individual.
Isn't this the still point of the reversal of perspective, the
exact point where movement, dialectics and time no longer exist?
Noon and eternity of the great refusal. Before it, the pogroms;
beyond it, the new innocence. The blood of Jews or the blood of
cops.

***

The active nihilist does not simply watch things fall apart. He
criticizes the causes of disintegration by speeding up the process.
Sabotage is a natural response to the chaos ruling the world.
Active nihilism is pre-revolutionary; passive nihilism is counter
revolutionary. And most people waltz tragicomically between the
two. Like the red soldier described by some Soviet author Victor
Chlovsky perhaps who never charged without shouting, ``Long Live
the Tsar!'' But circumstances inevitably end by drawing a line,
and people suddenly find themselves, once and for all, on one
side or the other of the barricades.

You learn to dance for yourself on the off-beat of the official
world. And you must follow your demands to their logical conclusion,
not accept a compromise at the first setback. Consumer society's
frantic need to manufacture new needs adroitly cashes in on the
way-out, the bizarre and the shocking. Black humour and real agony
turn up on Madison Avenue. Flirtation with non-conformism is an
integral part of prevailing values. Awareness of the decay of
values has its role to play in sales strategy. More and more pure
rubbish is marketed. The figurine salt-shaker of Kennedy, complete
with ``bullet-holes'' through which to pour salt, for sale in
the supermarket, should be enough to convince anybody, if there
is anybody who still needs convincing, how easily a joke which
once would have delighted Ravachol or Peter the Painter now merely
helps to keep the market going.

Consciousness of decay reached its most explosive expression in
Dada. Dada really did contain the seeds by which nihilism could
have been surpassed; but it just left them to rot, along with
all the rest. The whole ambiguity of surrealism, on the other
hand, lies in the fact that it was an accurate critique made at
the wrong moment. While its critique of the transcendence aborted
by Dada was perfectly justified, when it in its turn tried to
surpass Dada it did so without going back to Dada's initial nihilism,
without basing itself on Dada-anti-Dada, without seeing Dada historically.
History was the nightmare from which the surrealists never awoke:
they were defenseless before the Communist Party, they were out
of their depth with the Spanish Civil War. For all their yapping
they slunk after the official left like faithful dogs.

Certain features of Romanticism had already proved, without awakening
the slightest interest on the part of either Marx or Engels, that
art the pulse of culture and society is the first index of the
decay and disintegration of values. A century later, while Lenin
thought that the whole issue was beside the point, the Dadaist
could see the artistic abscess as a symptom of a cancer whose
poison was spread throughout society. Unpleasant art only reflects
the repression of pleasure instituted by Power. It is this the
Dadaists of 1916 proved so cogently. To go beyond this analysis
could mean only one thing: to take up arms. The neo-Dadaist larvae
pullulating in the shitheap of present-day consumption have found
more profitable employment.

The Dadaists, working to cure themselves and their civilization
of their discontents working, in the last analysis, more coherently
than Freud himself built the first laboratory for the revitalization
of everyday life. Their activity was far more radical than their
theory. Grosz: ``The point was to work completely in the dark.
We didn't know where we were going.'' The Dada group was a funnel
sucking in all the trivia and garbage cluttering up the world.
Reappearing at the other end, everything was transformed, original,
brand new. Though people and things stayed the same they took
on totally new meanings. The reversal of perspective was begun
in the magic of rediscovering lost experience. Subversion, the
tactics of the reversal of perspective, overthrew the rigid frame
of the old world. This upheaval showed exactly what is meant by
``poetry made by everyone'' a far cry indeed from the literary
mentality to which the surrealists eventually succumbed.

The initial weakness of Dada lay in its extraordinary humility.
Think of Tzara, who, it is said, used every morning to repeat
Descartes' statement, ``l don't even want to know whether there
were men before me.'' In this Tzara, a buffoon taking himself
as seriously as a pope, it is not hard to recognize the same individual
who would later spit on the memory of such men as Ravachol, Bonnot
and Makhno's peasant army by joining up with the Stalinist herds.

If Dada broke up because transcendence was impossible, the blame
still lies on the Dadaists themselves for having failed to search
the past for the real occasions when such transcendence became
a possibility: those moments when the masses arise and take their
destiny into their own hands.

***

The first compromise is always terrible in its effects. Dada's
original error tainted its heirs irrevocably: it infected surrealism
throughout its history, and finally turned malignant witness neo-Dadaism.
Admittedly, the surrealists looked to the past. But with what
results? While they were right in recognizing the subversive genius
of a Sade, a Fourier or a Lautréamont, all they could do
then was to write so much and so well about them as to win for
their heroes the honour of a few timid footnotes in progressive
school textbooks. A literary celebrity much like the celebrity
the Neo-Dadaists win for their forebears in the present spectacle
of decomposition.

The only modern phenomena comparable to Dada are the most savage
outbreaks of juvenile delinquency. The same contempt for art and
bourgeois values. The same refusal of ideology. The same will
to live. The same ignorance of history. The same barbaric revolt.
The same lack of tactics.

The nihilist makes one mistake: they do not realize that other
people are also nihilists, and that the nihilism of other people
is now an active historical factor. They have no consciousness
of the possibility of transcendence. The fact is, however, that
the present reign of survival, in which all the talk about progress
expresses nothing so much as the fear that progress may be impossible,
is the outcome of a series of past revolutionary defeats. The
history of survival is the historical movement which will eventually
turn these defeats into harbingers of victory.

Awareness of just how nightmarish life has become is on the point
of fusing with a rediscovery of the real revolutionary movement
in the past. We must reappropriate the most radical aspects of
all past revolts and insurrections at the point where they were
prematurely arrested, and bring to this task all the violence
bottled up inside us. A chain explosion of subterranean creativity
cannot fail to overturn the world of hierarchical power. In the
last reckoning, the nihilists are our only allies. They cannot
possibly go on living as they are. Their lives are like an open
wound. A revolutionary perspective could put all the latent energy
generated by years of repression at the service of their will
to live. Anyone who combines consciousness of past renunciations
with a historical consciousness of decomposition is ready to take
up arms in the cause of the transformation of daily life and of
the world. Nihilists, as de Sade would have said, one more effort
if you want to be revolutionaries!

The light of power is waning. The eyes of individual subjectivity
cannot adapt to mere holes in a mask, which are the eyes of those
fog-bound in shared illusion. The individual's point of view must
prevail over false collective participation. In total self-possession,
reach society with the tentacles of subjectivity and remake everything
startingwith yourself. The reversal of perspsctive is what is
positive in negativity, the fruit which will burst out of the
old world's bud (1-2).

One day Monsieur Keuner was asked just what was meant by "reversal
of perspective"; and he told the following story. Two brothers
deeply attached to one another had a strange habit. They marked
the nature of the day's events with pebbles a white one for each
happy moment and a black one for each moment of misfortune or
displeasure. But when, at the end of the day, they compared the
contents of the jars one found only white pebbles and the other
only black.

Fascinated by the persistence with which they lived the same experience
differently, they both agreed to ask the advice of an old man
famed for his wisdom. "You don't talk to one another enough"
said the wise man, "Both of you must give the reasons for
your choice, and discover its causes". From then on they
did so, and soon discovered that while the first remained faithful
to his white pebbles and the second to his black ones, in neither
jar were there as many pebbles as before. Where there had been
about thirty there were hardly more than seven or eight. After
a short while they went to see the wise man again. Both looked
extremely miserable. "Not so long ago," said one, "my
jar was filled with pebbles the colour of the night. My despair
was unbroken; I continued to live, I admit, only through the force
of habit. Now I hardly ever collect more than eight pebbles, but
what these eight signs of misery represent has become so intolerable
that I cannot go on like this." And the other said: "Every
day I piled up white pebbles.. Today there are only seven or eight,
but these obsess me to the point that I cannot recall these moments
of happiness without immediately wanting to relive them more intensely
and, in a word, eternally. This desire torments me". The
wise man smiled as he listened to them. "Excellent. Things
are shaping up well. Keep at it. And one thing: whenever you can,
ask yourselves why the game with the jar and the pebbles arouses
so much passion in you." When the two brothers next saw the
wise man it was to say "We asked ourselves the question but
we could not find the answer. So we asked the whole village. You
can see how much it has disturbed them. In the evening. squatting
in front of their houses, whole families discuss the black and
white pebbles. Only the elders and chieftains refuse to take part.
They say a pebble is a pebble, and all are of equal value."
The old man didn't conceal his pleasure. "Everything is developing
as I foresaw. Don't worry. Soon the question will no longer be
asked: it has lost its importance, and perhaps one day you will
no longer believe you ever asked it." Shortly afterwards
the old man's predictions were confirmed in the following way:
a great joy overcame the members of the village; at the dawn of
a troubled night, the rays of the sun fell upon the heads of the
elders and chieftains, impaled upon the sharp-pointed stakes of
the palisade.

The world has always had a geometry. The angle and perspective
within which men could see, speak to, and represent each other
was at first decided solely by the gods of the unitary epochs.
Then men, the men of the bourgeoisie, played a fast one on them:
they placed them in perspective, arraying them in an historical
becoming in which they were born, developed and killed off. History
was the twilight of the gods.

Seen historically, God is confused with the dialectlc of his material
aspect, masters and slaves, the history of class struggle and
hierarchical social power. Thus in a sense the bourgeoisie began
the reversal of perspective, only immediately to limit it to appearance.
God may be abolished, but the pillars which held him up still
rise towards the empty sky. And, as if the explosion in the cathedral
of sacred values spread in very slow shock waves, the crumbling
of mythic rubble is only complete today in the disintegration
of the spectacle, nearly two centuries after the attack. The bourgeoisie
is only a stage in the dynamiting of God who is now about to disappear
once and for all and with him all trace of his material origin:
man's domination of man.

Economic mechanisms, whose control and strength the bourgeoisie
partially possessed, revealed the materiality of power, releasing
it from the divine phantom. But at what price? God offered a sort
of refuge in his vast negation of the human in which the faithful
paradoxically had licence to affirm themselves against temporal
authority by opposing the absolute power of God to the 'usurped'
power of priests and rulers, as the mystics so often did. Today
it is power which sidles up to men and solicits them to consume
it. It weighs more and more heavily, reducing the space of life
to mere survival, compressing time to the density of a "role".
To use a facile image, one could compare power to an angle. Acute
at first, its summit lost in the depths of the sky, then gradually
growing wider as its summit sinks, becomes visible and subsides
to the point of becoming flat, extending its sides in a straight
line, which cannot be distinguished from a succession of points,
equivalent and without strength.

Beyond this line, which is that of nihilism, a new perspective
opens, which is neither the reflection of the previous one nor
its involution. On the contrary, it is a body of individual perspectives
in harmony, never entering into conflict, but constructing the
world according to the principles of coherence and collectivity.
All these angles, all different, nevertheless open in the same
direction, individual will henceforward being indistinguishable
from collective will.

The function of conditioning is to place and displace everyone
along the length of the hierarchical ladder. The reversal of perspective
entails a sort of anti-conditioning, not conditioning of a new
type, but playful tactics: diversion.

The reversal of perspective replaces knowledge by praxis,
hope by freedom and mediation by the will of the here and now.
It consecrates the triumph of a body of human relationships founded
on three inseparable poles: participation, communication and
realization.

To reverse perspective is to stop seeing with the eyes of the
community, ideology. family or other people. It is to grasp oneself
firmly, to choose oneself as starting point and centre. To base
everything on subjectivity and to follow one's subjective will
to be everything. In the sights of my insatiable desire to live,
the whole of power is only one particular target within a wider
horizon. It's show of strength doesn't obstruct my vision, but
I locate it, estimate its dangers, and study its movement. My
creativity, however poor it may be, is a more certain guide than
all the knowledge I have been forced to acquire. In the night
of power, its glow holds the hostile forces at bay: cultural conditioning,
every type of specialisation and Weltanschauungen are inevitably
totalitarian. Everyone has the absolute weapon. However, it must
be used with circumspection, like certain charms. If one approaches
it from the standpoint of lies and oppression - back to front
- then it is no more than bad clowning: an artistic consecration.
The acts which destroy power are the same as the acts which construct
free individual will but their range is different just as in strategy
preparation for defense is obviously different from preparation
for attack.

We haven't chosen the reversal of perspective through any kind
of voluntarism. It has chosen us. Caught as we are in the historical
phase of NOTHING, the next step can only be a change of EVERYTHING.
Consciousness of total revolution, of its necessity, is our final
way of being historical, our last chance, under certain conditions,
of unmaking history. The game we are about to play is the game
of our creativity. Its rules are radically opposed to the rules
and laws controlling our society. It is a game of loser wins:
what you are is more important than what is said, what is lived
is more important than what is represented on the level of appearances.
This game must be played right through to its conclusion. To cede
an inch in one's will to live without reserve is to surrender
all along the line. Those who give up their violence and their
radical demands are doomed. Murdered truths become venomous, said
Nietzsche. If we do not reverse perspective, then the perspective
of power will succeed in turning us against ourselves once and
for all. German Fascism was born in the blood of Spartacus. In
each daily renunciation, reaction is preparing nothing less than
the death of everyone.

[Chapter 20 is from the translation by Donald
Nicholson-Smith, Left Bank Books/Rebel Press, 1983. No copyright
claims will be made against publishers of nonprofit editions.

Chapter 20

Creativity, Spontaneity and Poetry

Human beings are in a state of creativity twenty-four
hours a day. Once revealed, the scheming use of freedom by the
mechanisms of domination produces a backlash in the form of an
idea of authentic freedom inseparably bound up with individual
creativity. The passion to create which issues from the consciousness
of constraint can no longer be pressed into the service of production,
consumption or organization. (1). Spontaneity is the mode of existence
of creativity; not an isolated state, but the unmediated experience
of subjectivity. Spontaneity concretizes the passion for creation
and is the first moment of its practical realization: the precondition
of poetry, of the impulse to change the world in accordance with
the demands of radical subjectivity. (2). The qualitative exists
wherever creative spontaneity manifests itself. It entails the
direct communication of the essential. It is poetry's chance.
A crystallization of possibilities, a multiplier of knowledge
and practical potential, and the proper modis operandi of intelligence.
Its criteria are sui generis. The qualitative leap precipitates
a chain reaction which is to be seen in all revolutionary moments;
such a reaction must be awoken by the scandal of free and total
creativity. (3). Poetry is the organizer of creative spontaneity
to the extent that it reinforces spontaneity's hold on reality.
Poetry is an act which engenders new realities; it is the fulfilment
of radical theory, the revolutionary act par excellence.

1

In this fractured world, whose common denominator throughout history
has been hierarchical social power, only one freedom has ever
been tolerated: the freedom to change the numerator, the freedom
to prefer one master to another. Freedom of choice so understood
has increasingly lost its attraction -- especially since it became
the official doctrine of the worst totalitarianisms of the modern
world, East and West. The generalization of the refusal to make
such a Hobson's choice -- to do no more than change employers
-- has in turn occasioned a restructuring of State power. All
the governments of the industrialized or semi-industrialized world
now tend to model themselves -- after a single prototype: the
common aim is to rationalize, to 'automate', the old forms of
domination. And herein lies freedom's first chance. The bourgeois
democracies have clearly shown that individual freedoms can be
tolerated only insofar as they entrench upon and destroy one another;
now that this is clear, it has become impossible for any government,
no matter how sophisticated, to wave the muleta of freedom without
everyone discerning the sword concealed behind it. In fact the
constant evocation of freedom merely incites freedom to rediscover
its roots in individual creativity, to break out of its official
definition as the permitted the licit, the tolerable -- to shatter
the benevolence of despotism.

Freedom's second chance comes once it has retrieved its creative
authenticity, and is tied up with the very mechanisms of Power.
It is obvious that abstract systems of exploitation and domination
are human creations, brought into being and refined through the
diversion or co-optation of creativity. The only forms of creativity
that authority can deal with, or wished to deal with, are those
which the spectacle can recuperate. But what people do officially
is nothing compared with what they do in secret. People usually
associate creativity with works of art, but what are works of
art alongside the creative energy displayed by everyone a thousand
times a day: seething unsatisfied desires, daydreams in search
of a foothold in reality, feelings at once confused and luminously
clear, ideas and gestures presaging nameless upheavals. All this
energy, of course, is relegated to anonymity and deprived of adequate
means of expression, imprisoned by survival and obliged to find
outlets by sacrificing its qualitative richness and conforming
to the spectacle's categories. Think of Cheval's palace, the Watts
Towers, Fourier's inspired system, or the pictorial universe of
Douanier Rousseau. Even more to the point, consider the incredible
diversity of anyone's dreams -- landscapes the brilliance of whose
colors qualitatively surpass the finest canvases of a Van Gogh.
Every individual is constantly building an ideal world within
themselves, even as their external motions bend to the requirements
of soulless routine.

Nobody, no matter how alienated, is without (or unaware of) an
irreducible core of creativity, a camera obscura safe from intrusion
from lies and constraints. If ever social organization extends
its control to this stronghold of humanity, its domination will
no longer be exercised over anything save robots, or corpses.
And, in a sense, this is why consciousness of creative energy
increases, paradoxically enough, as a function of consumer society's
efforts to co-opt it.

Argus is blind to the danger right in front of him. Where quantity
reigns, quality has no legal existence; but this is the very thing
that safeguards and nourishes it. I have already mentioned the
fact that the dissatisfaction bred by the manic pursuit of quantity
calls forth a radical desire for the qualitative. The more oppression
is justified in terms of the freedom to consume, the more the
malaise arising from this contradiction exacerbates the thirst
for total freedom. The crisis of production-based capitalism pointed
up the element of repressed creativity in the energy expended
by the worker, and Marx gave us the definitive expose of this
alienation of creativity through forced labor, through the exploitation
of the producer. Whatever the capitalist system and its avatars
(their antagonisms notwithstanding) lose on the production front
they try to make up for in the sphere of consumption. The idea
is that, as they gradually free themselves from the imperatives
of production, people should be trapped by the newer obligations
of the consumer. By opening up the wasteland of 'leisure' to a
creativity liberated at long last thanks to reduced working hours,
our kindly apostles of humanism are really only raising an army
suitable for training on the parade ground of a consumption- based
economy. Now that the alienation of the consumer is being exposed
by the dialectic internal to consumption itself, what kind of
prison can be devised for the highly subversive forces of individual
creativity? As I have already pointed out, the rulers' last chance
here is to turn us all into organizers of our own passivity.

With touching candour, Dewitt Peters remarks that, "If paints,
brushes and canvas were handed out to everyone who wanted them,
the results might be quite interesting". It is true that
if this policy were applied in a variety of well-defined and well-policed
spheres, such as the theatre, the plastic arts, music, writing,
etc., and in a general way to any such sphere susceptible of total
isolation from all the others, then the system might have a hope
of endowing people with the consciousness of the artist, ie.,
the consciousness of someone who makes a profession of displaying
their creativity in the museums and shopwindows of culture. The
popularity of such a culture would be a perfect index of Power's
success. Fortunately the chances of people being successfully
'culturized' in this way are now slight. Do they really imagine
that people can be persuaded to engage in free experiment within
bounds laid down by authoritarian decree? OR that prisoners who
have become aware of their creative capacity will be content to
decorate their cells with original graffiti? They are more likely
to apply their newfound penchant for experiment in other spheres:
firearms, desires, dreams, self- realization techniques. Especially
since the crowd is already full of agitators. No: the last possible
way of coopting creativity, which is the organization of artistic
passivity, is happily doomed to failure.

"What I am trying to reach", wrote Paul Klee, "is
a far-off point, at the sources of creation, where I suspect a
single explanatory principle applies for people, animals, plants,
fire, water, air and all the forces that surround us". As
a matter of fact, this point is only far off in Power's lying
perspective: the source of all creation lies in individual creativity;
it is from this starting point that everything, being or thing,
is ordered in accordance with poetry's grand freedom. This is
the take-off point of the new perspective: that perspective for
which everyone is struggling willy-nilly with all their strength
and at every moment of their existence. "Subjectivity is
the only truth" (Kierkegaard).

Power cannot enlist true creativity. In 1869 the Brussels police
thought they had found the famous gold of the International, about
which the capitalists were losing so much sleep. They seized a
huge strongbox hidden in some dark corner. When they opened it,
however, they found only coal. Little did the police know that
the pure gold of the International would always turn into coal
if touched by enemy hands.

The laboratory of individual creativity transmutes the basest
metals of daily life into gold through a revolutionary alchemy.
The prime objective is to dissolve slave consciousness, consciousness
of impotence, by releasing creativity's magnetic power; impotence
is magically dispelled as creative energy surges forth, genius
serene in its self-assurance. So sterile on the plane of the race
for prestige in the Spectacle, megalomania is an important phase
in the struggle of the self against the combined forces of conditioning.
The creative spark, which is the spark of true life, shines all
the more brightly in the night of nihilism which at present envelopes
us. As the project of a better organization of survival aborts,
the sparks will become more and more numerous and gradually coalesce
into a single light, the promise of a new organization based this
time on the harmonizing of individual wills. History is leading
us to the crossroads where radical subjectivity is destined to
encounter the possibility of changing the world. The crossroads
of the reversal of perspective.

2

Spontaneity. Spontaneity is the true mode of being of individual
creativity, creativity's initial, immaculate form, unpolluted
at the source and as yet unthreatened by the mechanisms of co-
optation. Whereas creativity in the broad sense is the most equitably
distributed thing imaginable, spontaneity seems to be confined
to a chosen few. Its possession is a privilege of those whom long
resistance to Power has endowed with a consciousness of their
own value as individuals. In revolutionary moments this means
the majority; in other periods, when the old mole works unseen,
day by day, it is still more people than one might think. For
so long as the light of creativity continues to shine spontaneity
has a chance.

"The new artist protests", wrote Tzara in 1919. "He
no longer paints: he creates directly." The new artists of
the future, constructors of situations to be lived, will undoubtedly
have immediacy as their most succinct - though also their most
radical - demand. I say 'succinct' because it is important after
all not to be confused by the connotations of the word 'spontaneity'.
Spontaneity can never spring from internalized restraints, even
subconscious ones, nor can it survive the effects of alienating
abstraction and spectacular co-optation: it is a conquest, not
a given. The reconstruction of the individual presupposes the
reconstruction of the unconscious (cf the construction of dreams).

What spontaneous creativity has lacked up to now is a clear consciousness
of its poetry. The commonsense view has always treated spontaneity
as a primary state, and initial stage in need of theoretical adaptation,
of transposition into formal terms. This view isolates spontaneity,
treats it as a thing-in-itself - and thus recognizes it only in
the travestied forms which it acquires within the spectacle (e.g.
action painting). In point of fact, spontaneous creativity carries
the seeds of a self- sufficient development within itself. It
is possessed by its own poetry.

For me spontaneity is immediate experience, consciousness of a
lived immediacy threatened on all sides yet not yet alienated,
not yet relegated to inauthenticity. The centre of lived experience
is that place where everyone comes closest to themself. Within
this unique space-time we have the clear conviction that reality
exempts us from necessity. Consciousness of necessity is always
what alienates us. We have been taught to apprehend ourselves
by default -- in absentia, so to speak. But it takes a single
moment of awareness of real life to eliminate all alibis, and
consign the absence of future to the same void as the absence
of past. Consciousness of the present harmonizes with lived experience
in a sort of extemporization. The pleasure this brings us -- impoverished
by its isolation, yet potentially rich because it reaches out
towards an identical pleasure in other people -- bears a striking
resemblance to the enjoyment of jazz. At its best, improvisation
in everyday life has much in common with jazz as evoked by Dauer:
:The African conception of rhythm differs from the Western in
that it is perceived through bodily movement rather than aurally.
The technique consists essentially in the introduction of discontinuity
into the static balance imposed upon time by rhythm and metre.
This discontinuity, which results from the existence of ecstatic
centres of gravity out of time with the musical rhythm and metre
proper, creates a constant tension between the static beat and
the ecstatic beat which is superimposed on it."

The instant of creative spontaneity is the minutest possible manifestation
of reversal of perspective. It is a unitary moment, i.e., one
and many. The eruption of lived pleasure is such that in losing
myself I find myself; forgetting that I exist, I realize myself.
Consciousness of immediate experience lies in this oscillation,
in this improvisational jazz. By contrast, thought directed toward
lived experience with analytical intent is bound to remain detached
from that experience. This applies to all reflection on everyday
life, including, to be sure, the present one. To combat this,
all I can do is try to incorporate an element of constant self-criticism,
so as to make the work of co-optation a little harder than usual.
The traveller who is always thinking about the length of the road
before them tires more easily than his or her companion who lets
their imagination wander as they go along. Similarly, anxious
attention paid to lived experience can only impede it, abstract
it, and make it into nothing more than a series of memories-to-be.

If thought is really to find a basis in lived experience, it has
to be free. The way to achieve this is to think other in terms
of the same. As you make yourself, imagine another self who will
make you one day in his or her turn. Such is my conception of
spontaneity: the highest possible self-consciousness which is
still inseparable from the self and from the world.

All the same, the paths of spontaneity are hard to find. Industrial
civilization has let them become overgrown. And even when we find
real life, knowing the best way to grasp it is not easy. Individual
experience is also prey to insanity -- a foothold for madness.
Kierkegaard described this state of affairs as follows: "It
is true that I have a lifebelt, but I cannot see the pole which
is supposed to pull me out of the water. This is a ghastly way
to experience things". The pole is there, of course, and
no doubt everyone could grab onto it, though many would be so
slow about it that they would die of anxiety before realizing
its existence. But exist it does, and its name is radical subjectivity:
the consciousness that all people have the same will to authentic
self-realization, and that their subjectivity is strengthened
by the perception of this subjective will in others. This way
of getting out of oneself and radiating out, not so much towards
others as towards that part of oneself that is to be found in
others, is what gives creative spontaneity the strategic importance
of a launching pad. The concepts and abstractions which rule us
have to be returned to their source, to lived experience, not
in order to validate them, but on the contrary to correct them,
to turn them on their heads, to restore them to that sphere whence
they derive and which they should never have left. This is a necessary
precondition of people's imminent realization that their individual
creativity is indistinguishable from universal creativity. The
sole authority is one's own lived experience; and this everyone
must prove to everyone else.

3

The qualitative. I have already said that creativity, though equally
distributed to all, only finds direct, spontaneous expression
on specific occasions. These occasions are pre- revolutionary
moments, the source of the poetry that changes life and transforms
the world. They must surely be placed under the sign of that modern
equivalent of grace, the qualitative. The presence of the divine
abomination is revealed by a cloying spirituality suddenly conferred
upon all, from the rustic to the most refined: on a cretin like
Claudel as readily as on a St.John of the Cross. Similarly, a
gesture, an attitude, perhaps merely a word, may suffice to show
that poetry's chance is at hand, that the total construction of
everyday life, a global reversal of perspective -- in short, the
revolution -- are immanent possibilities. The qualitative encapsulates
and crystallizes these possibilities; it is a direct communication
of the essential.

One day Kagame heard an old woman of Rwanda, who could neither
read nor write, complaining: "Really, these whites are incurably
simple-minded. They have no brains at all." "How can
you be so stupid?" he answered her. "I would like to
see you invent so many unimaginably marvellous things as the whites
have done." With a condescending smile the old woman replied,
"Listen, my child. They may have learned a lot of things,
but they have no brains. They don't understand anything."
And she was right, for the curse of technological civilization,
of quantified exchange and scientific knowledge, is that they
have created no means of freeing people's spontaneous creativity
directly; indeed, they do not even allow people to understand
the world in any unmediated fashion. The sentiments expressed
by the Rwandan woman -- whom the Belgian administrator doubtless
looked upon, from the heights of his superior intelligence, as
a wild animal -- are also to be found, though laden with guilt
and thus tainted by crass stupidity, in the old platitude: "I
have studied a great deal and now know that I know nothing".
For it is false, in a sense, to say that study can teach us nothing,
so long as it does not abandon the point of view of the totality.
What this attitude refuses to see, or to learn, are the various
stages of the qualitative -- whatever, at whatever level, lends
support to the qualitative. Imagine a number of apartments located
immediately above one another, communicating directly by means
of a central elevator and also indirectly linked by an outside
spiral staircase. People in the different apartments have direct
access to each other, whereas someone slowly climbing the spiral
stairs is cut off from them. The former have access to the qualitative
at all levels; the latter's knowledge is limited to one step at
a time, and so no dialogue is possible between the two. Thus the
revolutionary workers of 1848 were no doubt incapable of reading
the Communist Manifesto, yet they possessed within themselves
the essential lessons of Marx and Engels' text. In fact this is
what made the Marxist theory truly radical. The objective conditions
of the worker, expressed by the Manifesto on the level of theory,
made it possible for the most illiterate proletarian to understand
Marx immediately when the moment came. The cultivated person who
uses their culture like a flame thrower is bound to get on with
the uncultivated person who experiences what the first person
puts in scholarly terms the lived reality of everyday life. The
arms of criticism do indeed have to join forces with criticism
by force of arms.

Only the qualitative permits a higher stage to be reached in one
bound. This is the lesson that any endangered group must learn,
the pedagogy of the barricades. The graded world of hierarchical
power, however, can only envisage knowledge as being similarly
graded: the people on the spiral staircase, experts on the type
and number of steps, meet, pass, bump into one another and trade
insults. What difference does it make? At the bottom we have the
autodidact gorged on platitudes, at the top the intellectual collecting
ideas like butterflies: mirror images of foolishness. The opposition
between Miguel de Unamuno and the repulsive Millan Stray, between
the paid thinker and their reviler, is an empty one: where the
qualitative is not in evidence, intelligence is a fool's cap and
bells.

The alchemists called those elements needed for the Great Work
the materia prima. Paracelsus' description of this applies perfectly
to the qualitative: "It is obvious that the poor possess
it in greater abundance than the rich. People squander the good
portion of it and keep only the bad. It is visible and invisible,
and children play with it in the street. But the ignorant crush
it underfoot everyday." The consciousness of this qualitative
materia prima may be expected to become more and more acute in
most minds as the bastions of specialized thought and gradated
knowledge collapse. Those who make a profession of creating, and
those whose profession prevents them from creating, both artists
and workers, are being pushed into the same nihilism by the process
of proletarianization. This process, which is accompanied by resistance
to it, i.e., resistance to co-opted forms of creativity, occurs
amid such a plethora of cultural goods -- records, films, paperback
books -- that once these commodities have been freed from the
laws of consumption they will pass immediately into the service
of true creativity. The sabotage of the mechanisms of economic
and cultural consumption is epitomized by young people who steal
the books in which they expect to find confirmation of their radicalism.

Once the light of the qualitative is shed upon them, the most
varied kinds of knowledge combine and form a magnetic bridge powerful
enough to overthrow the weightiest traditions. The force of plain
spontaneous creativity increases knowledge at an exponential rate.
Using makeshift equipment and negligible funds, a German engineer
recently built an apparatus able to replace the cyclotron. If
individual creativity can achieve suck results with such meagre
stimulation, what marvels of energy must be expected from the
qualitative shock waves and chain reactions that will occur when
the spirit of freedom still alive in the individual re-emerges
in collective form to celebrate the great social fete, with its
joyful breaking of all taboos.

The job of a consistent revolutionary group, far from being the
creation of a new type of conditioning, is to establish protected
areas where the intensity of conditioning tends toward zero. Making
each person aware of their creative potential will be a hapless
task unless recourse is had to qualitative shock tactics. Which
is why we expect nothing from the mass parties and other groupings
based on the principle of quantitative recruitment. Something
can be expected, on the other hand, from a micro- society formed
on the basis of the radical acts or thought of its members, and
maintained in a permanent state of practical readiness by means
of strict theoretical discrimination. Cells successfully established
along such lines would have every chance of wielding sufficient
influence one day to free the creativity of the majority of the
people. The despair of the anarchist terrorist must be changed
into hope; those tactics, worthy of some medieval warrior, must
be changed into a modern strategy.

4

Poetry. What is poetry? It is the organization of creative spontaneity,
the exploitation of the qualitative in accordance with its internal
laws of coherence. Poetry is what the Greeks called poiein, 'making',
but 'making' restored to the purity of its moment of genesis --
seen, in other words, from the point of view of the totality.

Poetry cannot exist in the absence of the qualitative. In this
absence we find the opposite of the qualitative: information,
the transitional programme, specialization, reformism -- the various
guises of the fragmentary. The presence of the qualitative does
not of itself guarantee poetry, however. A rich complex of signs
and possibilities may get lost in confusion, disintegrate from
lack of coherence, or be destroyed by crossed purposes. The criterion
of effectiveness must remain supreme. Thus poetry is also radical
theory completely embodied in action; the mortar binding tactics
and revolutionary strategy; the high point of the great gamble
on everyday life.

What is poetry? In 1895, during an ill-advised and seemingly foredoomed
French railway worker's strike, one trade unionist stood up and
mentioned and ingenious and cheap way of advancing the strikers'
cause: "It takes two sous' worth of a certain substance used
in the right way to immobilize a locomotive". Thanks to this
bit of quick thinking, the tables were turned on the government
and capitalists. Here it is clear that poetry is the act which
brings new realities into being, the act which reverses the perspective.
The materia prima is within everyone's reach. Poets are those
who know how to use it to best effect. Moreover, two sous' worth
of some chemical is nothing compared with the profusion of unrivalled
energy generated and made available by everyday life itself: the
energy of the will to live, of desire unleashed, of the passions
of love, the power of fear and anxiety, the hurricane of hatred
and the wild impetus of the urge for destruction. What poetic
upheavals may confidently be expected to stem from such universally
experienced feelings as those associated with deaths, old age,
and sickness. The long revolution of everyday life, the only true
poetry-made-by-all, will take this still marginal consciousness
as its point of departure.

"What is poetry?", ask the aesthetes. And we may as
well give them the obvious answer right away: poetry rarely involves
poems these days. Most art works betray poetry. How could it be
otherwise, when poetry and power are irreconcilable? At best,
the artist's creativity is imprisoned, cloistered, within an unfinished
oeuvre, awaiting the day when it will have the last word. Unfortunately,
no matte how much importance the artist gives it, this last word,
which is supposed to usher in perfect communication, will never
be pronounced so long as the revolt of creativity has not realized
art.

The African work of art -- poem, music, sculpture, or mask --
is not considered complete until it has become a form of speech,
a word-in-action, a creative element which functions. Actually
this is true for more than African art. There is no art in the
world which does not seek to function; and to function -- even
on the level of later co-optation -- consistently with the very
same will which generated it, the will to live constantly in the
euphoria of the moment of creation. Why is it that the work of
the greatest artists never seems to have an end? The answer is
that great art cries out in every possible way for realization,
for the right to enter lived experience. The present decomposition
of art is a bow perfectly readied for such an arrow.

Nothing can save past culture from the cult of the past except
those pictures, writings, musical or lithic architectures, etc.,
whose qualitative dimension gets through to us free of its form
- - of all art forms. This happens with Sade and Lautréamont,
of course, but also with Villon, Lucretius, Rabelais, Pascal,
Fourier, Bosch, Danté, Bach, Swift, Shakespeare, Uccello,
etc. All are liable to shed their cultural chrysalis, and emerge
from the museums to which history has relegated them to become
so much dynamite for the bombs of the future realizers of art.
Thus the value of an old work of art should be assessed on the
basis of the amount of radical theory that can be drawn from it,
on the basis of the nucleus of creative spontaneity which the
new creators will be able to release from it for the purpose,
and by means of an unprecedented kind of poetry.

Radical theory's forte is its ability to postpone an action begun
by creative spontaneity without mitigating it or redirecting its
thrust. Conversely, the artistic approach seeks in its finest
moments to stamp the world with the impress of a tentacular subjective
activity constantly seeking to create, and to create itself. Whereas
radical theory sticks close to poetic reality, to reality in process
and to the world as it is being changed, art takes an identical
tack but at much greater risk of being lost and corrupted. Only
an art armed against itself, against its own weaker side -- its
most aesthetic side -- has any hope of evading co-optation.

Consumer society, as we well know, reduces art to a range of consumable
products. The more vulgarized this reduction, the faster the rate
of decomposition and the greater the chances for transcendence.
That communication so urgently sought by the artist is cut off
and prohibited even in the simplest relationships of everyday
life. So true is this that the search for new forms of communication,
far from being the preserve of painters and poets, is now part
of a collective effort. In this way the old specialization of
art has finally come to an end. There are no more artists because
everyone is an artist. The work of art of the future will be the
construction of a passionate life.

The object created is less important than the process which gives
rise to it, the act of creating. What makes an artist is their
state of creativity, not art galleries. Unfortunately, artists
rarely recognize themselves as creators: most of the time they
play to the gallery, exhibitionistically. A contemplative attitude
before a work of art was the first stone thrown at the creator.
They encouraged this attitude in the first place, but today it
is their undoing: now it amounts to no more than a need to consume,
an expression of the crassest economic imperatives. This is why
there is no longer any such thing as a work of art in the classical
sense of the word. Nor can there be such a thing. So much the
better. Poetry is to be found everywhere: in the facts, in the
events we bring about. The poetry of the facts, formerly always
treated as marginal, now stands at the centre of everyone's concerns,
at the centre of everyday life, a sphere which as a matter of
fact it has never left.

True poetry cares nothing for poems. In his quest for the Book,
Mallarmé wanted nothing so much as to abolish the poem.
What better way could there be of abolishing the poem than realizing
it? And indeed a few of Mallarmé's contemporaries proved
themselves rather brilliant exponents of just such a 'new poetry'.
Did the author of Herodiade have an inking, perhaps, when he described
them as "angels of purity", that the anarchists with
their bombs offered the poet a key which, walled up in his words,
he could never use?

Poetry is always somewhere. Its recent abandonment of the arts
makes it easier to see that it resides primarily in individual
acts, in a lifestyle and in the search for such a style. Everywhere
repressed, this poetry springs up everywhere. Brutally put down,
it is reborn in violence. It plays muse to rioters, informs revolt
and animates all great revolutionary carnivals for a while, until
the bureaucrats consign it to the prison of hagiography.

Lived poetry has effectively shown throughout history, even in
partial revolts, even in crime -- which Coeurderoy so aptly dubbed
the "revolt of one" -- that it is the protector par
excellence of everything irreducible in mankind, i.e., creative
spontaneity. The will to unite the individual and the social,
not on the basis of an illusory community but on that of subjectivity
-- this is what makes the new poetry into a weapon which everyone
must learn to handle by themself. Poetic experience is henceforth
at a premium. The organization of spontaneity will be the work
of spontaneity itself.

Power is the social organisation which enables masters to maintain
conditions of slavery. God, State, Organisation: these three words
reveal well enough the amount of autonomy and historical determination
there is in power, three principles have successively held sway:
the domination principle (feudal power), the exploitation principle
(bourgeois power) and the organisation principle (cybernetic power)
(2). Hierarchical social organisation has perfected itself by
desacralisation and mechanisation, but its contradictions have
increased. it has humanised itself to the extent that it has emptied
men of their human substance. it has gained in autonomy at the
expense of the masters; (the rulers are in control but it's the
strings that make them dance), today, those in power are perpetuating
the race of willing slaves, those whom Theognis said were born
with bowed heads, they have lost even the unhealthy pleasures
of domination. Facing the masters/slaves stand the men of refusal,
the new proletariat, rich in revolutionary traditions. From these
the masters without slaves will emerge, together with a superior
type of society in which the lived project of childhood and the
historical project of the great aristocrats will be realised (l)
(3).

In the Theages Plato writes: "Each man would 1ike
if posslble to be the master of all men. Or, better still, God."
A mediocre ambition in view of the weakness of masters and gods.
For if, in the last analysis, the pettiness of slaves derives
from the allegiance to their rulers, the pettiness of rulers and
of God Himself comes from deficiencies in the nature of those
ruled. The master knows alienation by its positive pole, the slave
by its negative pole; total mastery is equally refused both of
them.

How does the feudal lord behave in this dialectic of master and
slave? Slave of God and master of men - and master of men because
he is slave of God, as the myth would have it - we see him condemned
to blend within himself the disgust and respectful interest that
he has before God, for it is to God that he owes his obedience,
and it is from him that he derives his power over men. In short,
he reproduces between God and himself the type of relationship
that exists between nobles and king. What is a king? A chosen
one among the chosen, and one whose succession generally occurs
as a game in which equals compete. Feudal lords serve the king,
but they serve him as his equals in power, they submit themselves
to God in the same way as rivals and competitors.

One can understand why the masters of old were unsatisfied. Through
God they enter into the positive pole of alienation; through those
they oppress, into its negative pole. What desire could they have
to be God, knowing the boredom of positive alienation? And at
the same time, how could they not want to rid themselves of God,
the tyrant over them? The "To be or not to be" of great
men has always been expressed by the question, insoluble in their
epoch, of how to deny God, and yet preserve Him, that is, to supersede
and realize Him.

History bears witness to two practical attempts at such a supersession:
that of the mystics and that of the great refusers. Meister Eckhart
declared: "1 pray God to absolve me from God". Similarly,
the Swabian heretics of 1270 said that they had raised themselves
above God, and that, having attained the highest degree of divine
perfection, they had abandoned Him. On another tack, the negative
tack, certain strong personalities like Elogabalus, Gilles de
Rais and Erszebet Bathory, strove, as one can see, to attain a
total mastery over the world by the liquidation of intermediaries,
those who were alienating them positively, their slaves. They
approached the total man via a total inhumanity. "Against
Nature". So the passion for an unbounded rule and the absolute
refusal of constraints form the same single route, an ascending
and descending road on which Caligula and Spartacus, Gilles de
Rais and Dosza Gyorgy stand side by side, together yet separate.
However, it is not enough to say that the integral revolt of slaves
- I insist the integral revolt, and not its deficient forms whether
Christian, bourgeois or socialist - unites with the extreme revolt
of the masters of old. In fact, the will to abolish slavery and
all its sequels (the proletariat, servants, submissive and passive
men) offers a unique chance to the will to rule the world with
no other limit than a reinvented nature, and the resistance of
objects to their own transformation.

That chance is inscribed in the historical process. History exists
because the oppressed exist. The struggle against nature, and
then against the different social organisations of the struggle
against nature, is always the struggle for human emancipation,
for the total man. The refusal to be a slave is really what changes
the world.

So what is the goal of history? History is made "under certain
conditions" (Marx) by slaves against slavery. Thus it can
only pursue one aim: the destruction of masters. For his part,
the master never stops trying to escape from history, to refuse
it by massacring those who make it, and who make it against him.

Some paradoxes:

1. The most human aspect of the masters of old resides in their
claim to absolute mastery. Such a project implies the absolute
blockage of history, and thus the extreme refusal of emancipation.
That is to say, total inhumanity.

2. The desire to escape from history makes you vulnerable. If
you try to flee you lose your cover, and are more easily attacked;
a determined immobility can no more resist waves of attack by
lived reality than it can the dialectic of productive forces.
The masters are the sacrificial victims of history; from the height
of the pyramid of the present, contemplating three thousand years
of history, one can see them crushed by it, either in terms of
a definite plan, a strict programme, or a line of force which
allows one to conceive of a Sense of History (the end of the slave
world, the feudal world and the bourgeois world).

Because they try to escape it, the masters slot themselves tidily
in the drawers of history: they enter into linear temporal evolution
in spite of themselves. On the other hand, those who make history,
the revolutionaries, slaves drunk with total freedom, seem to
act "sub specie aeternitatis", under the sign of the
intemporal, driven by an insatiable taste for an intense life,
pursuing their aim through various historical conditions. Perhaps
the philosophical notion of eternity is linked with historical
attempts at emancipation,.. perhaps this notion will one day be
realised, like philosophy, by those who carry within them total
freedom and the end of traditional history.

3. The superiority of the negative pole of alienation over the
positive pole is that its integral revolt makes the project of
absolute mastery the only solution. Slaves in struggle for the
abolition of constraints reveal the moment through which history
liquidates masters, and beyond history, there is the possibility
of a new power over the things that they encounter, a power which
no longer appropriates objects by appropriating people. But in
the very course of a slowly elaborated history, it has been inevitable
that the masters, instead of disappearing, have degenerated; there
are no longer any masters, only slave-consumers of power, differing
among themselves only in the degree and quantity of power consumed.

The transformation of the world by the productive forces was bound
slowly to realise the material conditions of total emancipation,
having first passed through the stage of the bourgeoisie. Today,
when automation and cybernetics applied in a human way would permit
the construction of the dream of masters and slaves of all time,
there only exists a socially shapeless magma which blends in each
individual paltry portions of master and slave. Yet it is from
this reign of equivalent values that then new masters,
the masters without slaves, will emerge.

I want in passing to hail de Sade. He is, as much by his privileged
appearance at a turning point in history as by his astounding
lucidity, the last of the great aristocrats in revolt. How do
the masters of the Chateau of Selling assure their absolute mastery?
They massacre all their servants and reach an eternity of delight
by this gesture. This is the subject of 120 Days of Sodom.

Marquis and sans-culotte, D.A.F. de Sade unites the perfect hedonist
logic of the grand seigneur badman and the revolutionary desire
to enjoy without limitations a subjectivity which is at last freed
from the hierarchical framework. The desperate effort he makes
to abolish both positive and negative poles of alienation ranges
him at once among the most important theoreticians of the total
man. Its high time that revolutionaries were reading de Sade with
the same care that they set about reading Marx. (Of Marx, as we
know, the revolutionary specialists know mostly what he wrote
under the pseudonym of Stalin, or at best of Lenin and Trotsky.)
At any rate, nobody who wants to change daily life radically will
be able from now on to ignore either the great refusers of power,
or those masters of old who came to feel cramped in the power
that God granted them.

2

Bourgeois power fed on the crumbs of feudal power. It is crumbled
feudal power. Eaten away by revolutionary criticism, trodden underfoot
and broken up, (without this liquidation ever reaching its logical
conclusion - the end of hierarchical power), aristocratic authority
survived the death of the aristocracy in the form of parody, the
pain-stricken grin. Awkward and stiff in their fragmentary power,
making their fragment a totality (and the totalitarian is nothing
else), the bourgeois rulers were condemned to see their prestige
fall apart at the seams, rotted by the decomposition of the spectacle.
As soon as myth and authority lost their credibility, the form
of government could only be either burlesque terror or democratic
bullshit. O look at Napoleon's pretty children! Louis Philippe,
Napoleon III, Thiers, Alphonse XIII, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin.
Franco, Salazar, Nasser, Mao, de Gaulle... ubiquitous Ubus in
the four corners of the world spawning more and more cretinous
miscarriages. Yesterday they still brandished their twigs of authority
like Olympian thunderbolts; today the apes of power glean no more
from the social scene than a little dubious respect. Certainly,
the absurdity of a Franco is still lethal - no-one would dream
of forgetting it - but one should always remember that the stupidity
of power will be a deadlier killer than stupidity in power.

The spectacle is the brainscrambling machine of our penal colony,
The master-slaves of today are its faithful servants, the extras
and stage-managers. Who will want to judge them? They will plead
not guilty and in fact they aren't really guilty. They don't need
cynicism so much as spontaneous confessions, terror so much as
acquiescent victims, or force so much as herds of masochists.
The alibi of the rulers lies in the cowardice of the ruled. But
now everyone is governed, manipulated as things by an abstract
power, by an organisation-in-itself whose laws are imposed on
the self-styled rulers. Things are not judged, they are just stopped
from being a nuisance.

In October 1963 Monsieur Fourastié reached the following
conclusions on the subject of the future leader: "The leader
has lost his almost magical power; he is and will be a
man capable of provoking actions. Finally, a reign of workgroups
will develop to prepare decisions. The leader will be a committee
president, but one who knows how to sum up and make decisions."
(My italics). You can see the three historical phases characterising
the evolution of the master:

1. The principle of domination, linked with feudal society.

2. The principle of exploitation, linked with bourgeois society.

3. The principle of organisation, linked with cybernetic society.

In fact, the three elements are inseparable; one cannot dominate
without exploiting and organising at the same time; but their
importance varies with the epoch. As one passes from one stage
to the next, the autonomy and the role of the master wane and
diminish. The humanity of the master tends towards zero, while
the inhumanity of disembodied power tends towards infinity.

According to the principle of domination, the master refuses
slaves an existence which would limit his own. With the principle
of exploitation, the boss allows the workers an existence
which fattens and develops his own. The principle of organisation
classifies individual existences like fractions, according to
their managerial or executive faculties. (A shop-steward would,
for example, be defined in terms of long calculations involving
his productivity, his representativeness, etc., as 56 per cent
directing function, 40 per cent executive function and 4 per cent
ambiguity, as Fourier would have said.)

Domination is a right, exploitation a contract, organisation an
order of things. The tyrant dominates according to his will to
power, the capitalist exploits according to the laws of profit,
the organiser plans and is planned. The first wants to be arbitrary,
the second just, the third rational and objective. The aristocrat's
inhumanity is a humanity seeking itself; the exploiter's inhumanity
tries to disguise itself by seducing humanity with technical progress,
comfort and the struggle against hunger and disease; the cybernetician's
inhumanity is the inhumanity which accepts itself. In this manner,
the master's inhumanity has become less and less human. A systematic
extermination camp is far more horrifying than the murderous fury
of feudal barons throwing themselves into gratuitous war. And
what lyricism there still is even in the massacres of Auschwitz
compared with the icy hands of generalised conditioning which
the cyberneticians' technocratic organisation reach out towards
the future society, that is so close!

Make no mistake: it's not a matter of choosing between the "humanity"
of a lettre de cachet and the "humanity" of a brain-washing.
That's the choice between being hanged and being shot! I simply
mean that the dubious pleasures of dominating and crushing underfoot
tend to disappear. Capitalism formally introduced the need to
exploit men without passionately enjoying it. No sadism, no negative
joy of inflicting pain, no human perversion, not even the man
"against nature". The reign of things is accomplished.
In renouncing the hedonist principle, the masters have renounced
mastery. It is the task of the masters without slaves to correct
this self-denial.

What the society of production sowed is reaped today by the dictatorship
of the consumable. Its principle of organisation merely perfects
the real mastery of dead things over men. Whatever power remained
to the owners of the instruments of production disappeared when
their machines escaped them and passed under the control of the
technicians who organise their use. Meanwhile, the organisers
themselves are gradually ingested by the charts and programmes
which they have so carefully worked out. The simple machine wil1
be the leader's last justification, the last support for his last
trace of humanity. Cybernetic organisation of production and consumption
must necessarily control, plan and rationalise daily life.

These small-time masters are the specialists, masters/ slaves
who pullulate all over daily life. No one need worry, they don't
stand a chance. Already by 1867, at the Congress of Basel. Francau,
a member of the First International, was declaring: "We've
been towed along by marquesses of diplomas and princes of science
for far too long. Let's look after our own affairs and however
inept we are we can't make more of a mess than what they've done
in our name." Ripe words of wisdom, whose meaning grows as
specialists proliferate and encrust individual life. Those who
succumb to the magnetic attraction exercised by the huge Kafkaesque
cybernetic machine are nicely divided from those who follow their
own impulses and try to escape from it. The latter are the trustees
of everything human, since from now on nobody can lay any clalm
to it in the name of the masters of old. There are only things
falling at the same speed in a vacuum on the one hand, and, on
the other, the age-old project of slaves drunk with total freedom.

3

The master without slaves, or the aristocratic supersession
of the aristocracy. The master lost out in the same way as
God. He topples like a Golem the moment he stops loving mankind,
and thus the moment he ceases to enjoy indulging his pleasure
of oppressing them. That's when he abandons hedonism. There is
little fun just moving things around, dealing with being inert
as bricks. With fine discernment. God seeks out living creatures
with smooth palpitating flesh whose souls shiver in terror and
respect. To confirm His own grandeur, He needs to feel the presence
of His subjects, fervent in prayer, competition, cunning, and
even insult. The Catholic God is quite good at lending out a little
genuine freedom, in the manner of a pawnbroker. Like a cat with
a mouse, He lets men alone, until the Last Judgment when He'll
gobble them up. Then, towards the close of the Middle Ages when
the bourgeoisie enters on the scene, we see Him humanising Himself;
paradoxically, for He is becoming an object, just as each man
is. When He condemns men to predestination, Calvin's God loses
the pleasure of arbitrariness: He's no longer free to crush whom
He will, nor when He will. The God of commercial transactions,
humourless, as cold and calculated as a discount rate, is ashamed;
He hides away. Deus absconditus. The dialogue is broken.
Pascal despairs. Descartes does not know what to do with a soul
that is suddenly unattached. Later - too late - Kierkegaard will
attempt to resuscitate the subjective God by resuscitating men's
subjectivity. But nothing can bring God back to life once He has
become in men's minds "the great external object"; He
is definitely dead, turned to stone, like coral. Moreover, mankind,
caught in the rigor mortis of His last embrace (the hierarchical
form of power), seems doomed to reification, the death of what's
human. The perspective of power offers our gaze nothing but things,
fragments of the great divine rock. Isn't it according to this
perspective that sociology, psychology, economics, and the so-called
"human" sciences - so anxious to observe "objectively"
- focus their microscopes?

What forces the master to abandon his hedonism? What prevents
him reaching total enjoyment if not his position as master, his
prejudice for hierarchical superiority? That renunciation grows
greater as hierarchy fragments, as masters multiply and shrink
in status, as history democratises power. The imperfect enjoyment
of the masters has become the enjoyment of imperfect masters.
We have seen the bourgeois masters, Ubuesque plebians, crown their
beerhall revolt with the funeral festivity of Fascism. But there
will be no more festivities among the masters/slaves, among the
last of hierarchical man; only the sadness of things, a gloomy
placidity, uneasy role-playing, the awareness of "belng nothing".

What will become of these things that govern us? Must we destroy
them? Given an affirmative, those best prepared to liquidate the
slaves-in-power are those who've been struggling against slavery
all along. Popular creativity, which neither lords nor bosses
have managed to break, will never kow-tow to programmatic necessity
and technocrats' plans. You might object that less passion and
enthusiasm are aroused by liquidating an abstract form and a system
than by executing detested masters; that's to see the problem
in the wrong light, the light of power. Unlike the bourgeoisie,
the proletariat does not define itself in terms of its class enemy;
it brings the end of class distinction and hierarchy. The role
of the bourgeoisie was uniquely negative. Saint-Just captures
it superbly: "What constitutes a republic is the total destruction
of what opposes it."

If the bourgeoisie is content with forging weapons against feudalism
and therefore against itself, the proletariat, on the other hand,
contains its own possible supersession. It is poetry momentarily
alienated by the ruling class or technocratic organisation, but
always on the point of bursting out. As the sole trustee of the
will to live since it has felt to the full how intolerable is
mere survival, the proletariat will break the wall of constralnts
by the breath of its pleasure and the spontaneous violence of
its creativity. It already possesses all the joy to be had and
all the laughter to offer. It draws its strength and passion from
itself. What it is preparing to build will in addition
destroy all that opposes it just as a new tape recording erases
the previous one. The proletariat will abolish itself at the same
instant that it abolishes the power of things, with luxuriance,
a trace of nonchalance and the grace worn by the man who has proved
his superiority. The masters wlthout slaves will emerge from the
new proletariat; not the conditioned robots of humanism that the
self-styled 'revolutionary' leftist onanists dream about. The
insurrectional violence of the masses is only one aspect of the
proletariat's creativity, its impatience to abolish itself, as
strong as its desires to carry out the sentence that survival
pronounces upon itself.

I like to distinguish - a specious distinction - three predominant
passions in the destruction of the reified order. The passion
for absolute power, exercised over objects placed immediately
at the service of men; without the mediation of men themselves.
It's therefore the destruction of those hooked on the order of
things, the slave-owners of fragmented power. "Because we
can no longer stand the sight of slaves, we suppress them."
(Nietzsche)

The the passion to destroy constraints, to smash the chains.
As De Sade says: "Can lawful pleasure compare with the delights
which combine far more piquant attractions with the inestimable
joy of breaking social constraints and overthrowing all laws?"

The passion to straighten out a miserable past, to re-excite
old disappointed hopes as much in each individual life as in the
history of crushed revolutions. Just as once it was legitimate
to punish Louis XVI for the crimes of his predecessors, so today
there's no lack of passionate reasons, as it's impossible to take
revenge on things, to wipe out the memory of the executed Communards,
the torture of the peasants of 1525, the assassination of workers,
revolutionaries hunted down and shot, civilisations obliterated
by colonialism, so much pain in free souls from past misery that
the present has never eradicated. The correction of history has
become passionate because it is possible: to swamp the blood of
Babeuf, Lacenaire, Ravachol and Bonnot in the blood of the hidden
descendants of those who, as slaves of an order founded on profit
and economic mechanisms, thought to put cruel checks on human
emancipation.

The pleasure of overthrowing power, being master-without-slaves
and righting the past is what lies uppermost in the subjectivity
of each of us. In the revolutionary moment, every man is invited
to make his own history himself. Freedom of realization as
a cause, while ceasing to be a cause, always espouses subjectivity.
Only such a perspective can loosen the riot of intoxicating possibilities
and the giddy feeling when every delight is within the grasp of
all.

*

Take care that the old order of things doesn't collapse on the
heads of those demolishing it. The avalanche of the consumable
could drag us down in the final fall if people don't take care
to arrange collective shelters against the conditioning of the
spectacle and hierarchical organisation; shelters from which further
offensives will be launched. The microsocieties that are now forming
will realise the former masters' project as they free it from
its hierarchical mould. The supersession of the "grand seigneur
bad man" will apply to the letter that admirable principle
of Keats: "Everything that can be annihilated must be annihilated
so that children may be saved from slavery".

This supersession must operate simultaneously on three levels:
1. Supersession of patriarchal organisation.
2. Supersession of hierarchical power.
3. Supersession of the arbitrarily subjective, the authoritarian
whim.

1. - Lineage contains the magic strength of the aristocracy, the
energy transmitted from generation to generation. By undermining
feudal mastery, the bourgeoisie was led against its will to undermine
the family. And it acts the same way towards the organisation
of society... I've already said that this very negativity surely
represents its richest, most 'positive', aspect. But what the
bourgeoisie lacks is the possibility of supersession. What would
the supersession of an aristocratic type of family imply? We would
have to answer: the formation of coherent groups where individual
creativity is totally invested in collective creativity and strengthened
by it; where the immediacy of the lived present takes over the
energy potential which in feudal times derived from the past.
The relative weakness of the master paralysed by his own hierarchical
system brings to mind the weakness of the child brought up within
the bourgeois family framework.

The child acquires a subjective experience of freedom unknown
to any other animal species. but he remains for all that subjectively
dependent upon his parents - he needs their care and their solicitude.
What differentiates child from animal is that the child possesses
a feeling of the continuous transformation of the world, or poetry,
to an unlimited degree. At the same time he is denied access to
the techniques that adults use most of the time against such poetry,
for example against children by conditioning them. And when children,
in their maturity, finally acquire the techniques, they have lost,
under the weight of constraints, what made their childhood superior.
The universe of the masters of old falls under the same curse
as the universe of children: they have no access to the techniques
of liberation. Consequently they are condemned to dream of world
transformation and live according to the laws of adaptation
to it. One was quite justified in believing that hierarchical
organisation was the best means of concentrating social energy
in a world where that energy didn't enjoy the valuable support
of machinery. But once the bourgeoisie develops highly effective
techniques for transforming the world, then hierarchical power
becomes anachronistic, and acts like a brake on the development
of human power over the world. The hierarchical system, man's
power over man, prevents the recognition of worthwhile adversaries,
thwarting the real transformation of one's surroundings. Instead,
it just saddles one with the need to adapt to the environment
and conform to the state of things. That's why:

2. In order to smash the social screen that messes up our vision,
we postulate the categorical rejection of any hierarchy within
the group. The very notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat
deserves attention. On most occasions, the dictatorship of the
proletariat turns into dictatorship over the proletariat,
and becomes institutionalized. Now, as Lenin wrote: "The
dictatorship of the proletariat is a relentless struggle, both
bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic,
educational and administrative, against the forces and tradition
of the Old World." The proletariat cannot set up a lasting
domination, since it cannot exercise a dictatorship that no-one
wants. Conversely, the absolute need to smash the enemy obliges
it to concentrate in its hands a strongly coherent repressive
power. So it's a matter of passing through a dictatorship that
itself negates itself, as the party "whose victory must also
be its defeat", the proletariat itself. The proletariat,
through its dictatorship, must immediately make its own negation
its first priority. It has no choice but to liquidate, in a short
space of time, bloodily or not as circumstances permit, those
who stand in the way of its project of total freedom and those
who oppose the ending of its existence as proletariat. It must
utterly destroy them as vermin. Every single individual must root
out the slightest inclination for prestige and the most trivial
hierarchical pretensions, and raise against these roles a calm
impetus towards authentic life.

3. - The end of roles means the triumph of subjectivity. Once
this subjectivity is finally recognized and set at the centre
of concern, contradictorily it brings a new objectivity into being.
A new world of objects, or, if you prefer, a new nature, will
create itself out of the needs of individual subjectivity. Here
too a relationship is established between childhood's perspective
and that of the feudal masters. In the one as in the other, even
though in a completely different manner, the possibilities are
masked by the screen of social alienation.

Who can have forgotten? Childhood solitudes would open on primaeval
vastness, and every stick was a magic wand. Then we had to adapt,
become social and sociable. The solitude was depopulated, the
children chose despite themselves to grow old, and the vastness
closed up like a story book. Nobody in this world completely escapes
the sewers of puberty. Childhood itself is slowly colonised by
consumer society. Those under ten join "teen-agers"
in the great consumer family and grow older faster as "junior
consumers'. It's impossible at this point not to feel the similarity
between the historical dethronement of the masters of old and
the growing decadence of the kingdom of childhood. Never before
has the corruption of humanity reached such an intensity. Never
before have we been so near and yet so far from the total man.

The caprices of the masters of old, the lords, were insidiously
inferior to the whims of the child, for they demanded the repression
of other men. Whatever subjectivity there is in feudal arbitrariness
- as I choose I shall give you riches or death - is spoilt and
fettered by the poverty of its realisation. The master's subjectivity
is only realised by denying the subjectivity of others, and thus
by loading itself with chains; it chains itself by chaining others.

The child does not have this privilege of imperfection. In one
fell swoop he loses his right to pure subjectivity. He's taunted
with childishness, encouraged to behave like a grown-up. Any everyone
grows up, suppressing his childhood to the point where cretinism
and death pangs convince him that he's managing to live like an
adult.

The child's game like that of the great noble, needs to be freed
and given the honour it is due. Today, the moment is historically
favourable. It's a matter of saving childhood and its sovereign
subjectivity, childhood and the laughter which is like the rippling
of spontaneity, childhood and its way of relying upon itself to
light up the world, and the objects within it, in a strangely
familiar light - by realizing the project of the masters of old.

We have lost the beauty of things, their way of existing, by letting
them die at the hands of power and the gods. Surrealism's magnificent
dream tried in vain to bring them back to life and suffuse them
with poetry. But the power of imagination alone is not enough
to shatter the framework in which social alienation imprisons
things, for it doesn't return them to the free play of subjectivity.
In the light of power, a stone, a tree, a concrete mixer, or a
cyclotron are dead objects, crosses planted on the will to see
them differently and change them. And yet, beyond what they have
been made to mean, I know I shall find their exhilaration again.
I know what emotion a machine can awaken when brought into the
game, into fantasy and freedom. In a world where everything is
alive, including trees and rocks, nothing is just passively contemplated.
Everything speaks of joy. Subjectivity's triumph gives everything
life; and isn't the fact that dead things exercise an intolerable
domination over subjectivity really the best chance, historically,
of arriving at a superior way of life?

What does it take? The realisation in today's language - that
is to say, praxis - of what a heretic once declared to
Ruysbroeck : "God can know, wish, do nothing without me.
With God I have created myself and I have created all things,
and it is my hand that supports heaven and earth and all creatures.
Without me nothing exists."

We must discover new frontiers. If the bounds of social alienation
still imprison us, at least they no longer deceive us. For centuries
men have remained before a wormeaten door, piercing little pin-holes
in it with growing ease. One kick is now enough to knock it down,
and that's when everything begins. The proletariat's problem is
no longer to seize power, but to put a definite end to it. On
the other side of the hierarchical world, the possibilities come
to meet us. The primacy of life over survival will be the historical
movement which will unmake history. We have yet to invent worthwhile
adversaries. It is up to us to find them, and to join them through
the looking-glass of childhood.

Will we see men resume the cosmic communication that the first
inhabitants of the earth must have known, only this time on a
higher level reaching way above prehistory, and without the fearful
trembling of early man defenceless before its mystery? In short,
will men impose a human meaning on the universe which would most
beneficially replace the divine meaning with which it was invested
at the dawn of time?

And this other infinite, man as he really is? Could he not one
day govern his body, this constant flow of nerves, his beautiful
muscular system and his wayfaring through dreams? Couldn't the
exploits of individual will finally freed by collective will get
beyond the already sinister degree of control that police conditioning
can impose on the human being? We know how to make a dog. a brick
and a cop out of a man; do we know how to make a man?

We have never really believed our infallibility. We have left
that claim - out of pride perhaps - to unalterable forms and wrinkled
old men: power, God, the Pope, the boss, the others. And yet every
time we refer to Society, God, or All-powerful Justice, we're
really talking about our own power, even though, it's true, we
are talking rather badly and indirectly. We are one step above
prehistory. It's the dawn of another human organisation, a society
where individual creativity gives its energy free reign, to shape
the world according to each individual's dreams harmonised by
all.

Utopia? Get stuffed! How condescension drivels! Who doesn't behave
as if this world wasn't the dearest thing he owned? Sure, there
are many who've let go, and now fall as despairingly as once they
held on. Everyone wants his subjectivity to win out: we must therefore
base the unity of men upon this common desire. No-one can strengthen
his subjectivity without others helping him, without the aid of
a group which has itself developed a subjective centre, a faithful
reflection of the subjectivity of its members. The Situationist
International is so far the only group to decide to defend radical
subjectivity.

XXII THE SPACE-TIME OF LIVED EXPERIENCE AND THE CORRECTION
OF THE
PAST

The dialectic of decay and supersession is the dialectic of
dissociated and unitary space-time (l). The new proletariat carries
within itself the realisation of childhood, which is its space-time
(2). The history of separations is slowly resolved at the end
of "historic" history (3). Cyclical time and linear
time. - Lived space-time is space-time in transformation, and
the role's space-time is that of adaptation. - The function of
the past and of its projection into the future is to outlaw the
present. Historical ideology is the screen that comes between
the will to individual self-realisation and the will to construct
history; it prevents them joining up and merging (4). The present
is the space-time to be constructed; it entails the correction
of the past.

1

As specialists organise the survival of the species and leave
learned diagrams to programme history, the will to change life
by changing the world grows among people everywhere. So much so
that every single individual is confronted, like humanity as a
whole, by universal despair beyond which lies oblivion or supersession.
This is the age when the entire evolution of history and the particular
history of the individual are tending to merge, since they are
heading towards a corn destiny. the condition of a thing
and its rejection. We could say that the history of the species
and of myriad individual lives are gathering together to die,
or together start EVERYTHING afresh. The past surges back on us
with its germs of death and its seeds of life. Our childhood is
also at the meeting place, and threatened with Lot's fate.

The danger overhanging childhood gives rise, I would like to believe,
to the outburst of revolt against the ghastly aging to which the
forced consumption of ideologies and gadgets condemns us. I want
to emphasise the analogy clearly revealed between dreams and desires,
and the feudal will and the subjective will of childhood. By realising
childhood, won't we, adults of the technological era, rich in
what children lack and strong where the greatest conquerors were
weak, realise the project of the masters of old?

Can't we identify history and individual destiny more successfully
than Tamerlalne or Elogabalus dared Imagine in their wildest dreams?

The primacy of life over survival Is the historical movement which
will unmake history. Construct daily life and realise history.
these two watchwords are now one. In decay and supersession, the
essential contradiction of our era, the transition to a stage
superior to prehistory is prepared. What will constitute the joint
construction of life and the new society, in other words, the
revolution of everyday life? Rooting out decay by superseding
it. All that Is not superseded rots, all that rots incites supersession.

However far back into history, all attempts at supersession are
part of the poetry of the present reversal of perspective. They
are with us now, bursting the barriers of space and time and breaking
them down. It's certain that the end of separations begins by
ending the separation between space and time. What follows in
the reconstitution of primordial unity must be critical analyses
of the space-time of children, of unitary societies and of fragmentary
societies as bearers of decay and the supersession now possible.

2

If he doesn't watch out, survival sickness soon turns a young
man into a haggard old Faust, burdened with regrets, passing through
the youth he longs for without realizing it. The 'teenager' bears
the first wrinkles of the consumer.

Little separates him from the sixty-year-old; consuming faster
and faster, he wins precocious old age to the rhythm of his compromises
with inauthenticity. If he doesn't take hold of himself quickly,
the past will close up behind him; he won't be able to return
to what he's done, not even to remake it. So much separates him
from the children he played with only yesterday. He has become
part of the market's triviality, willing to exchange the poetry,
freedom and subjective wealth of childhood for representation
in the society of the spectacle. Yet nonetheless, if he seized
hold of himself and awoke from the nightmare, what an enemy would
. You will see him fight for the confront the forces of order'
rights of his childhood with the most fearsome weapons devised
by senile technocracy. We know what prodigious feats distinguished
the young Simbas of the Lumumbaist revolution, in spite of their
derisory equipment; so how much more can we expect from a generation
that's equally pissed off but much more effectively armed, and
at large in a theatre of operations that covers every aspect of
daily life?

Every aspect of daily life is lived to Some extent in embryonic
form during childhood. The rich hoard of events lived in a few
days or a few hours prevents time passing. Two months holiday
is an eternity. Two months for an old man is just a few minutes.
The child's days escape adult time; their time is swollen by subjectivity,
passion, dreams haunted by reality. Outside, the educators look
on, waiting, watch in hand, till the child joins and fits the
cycle of the hours. It's they who have time. At first,
the child feels strongly the imposition of adult time as a foreign
intrusion; he ends up succumbing, and agrees to grow old. Not
knowing conditioning's subtle ways, he allows himself to be snared,
like a young animal. When finally he possesses the weapons of
criticism and wants to aim them at time, the years have carried
him far from the target. In his heart his childhood lies an open
wound.

So here we are all haunted by childhood, and meanwhile social
organisation is scientifically destroying it. Psycho-, sociologists
are on the look-out, and already the market researchers are exclaiming:
"Just look at all those sweet little dollars." (Quoted
by Vance Packard.) A new decimal system.

Children are playing in the street. Suddenly one of them leaves
the group and comes up to me, bringing the most beautiful dreams
I can remember. He shows me - for my ignorance on this point was
the sole reason for my fall - what destroys the concept of age:
the possibility of living many events; not just seeing them pass
by, but of living them and recreating them endlessly. And now
at this point where everything slips away from me and everything
becomes clear to me, how could a kind of wild untamed instinct
for totality not surge up in me from under so many false desires,
my childishness turned dangerous through the lessons of history
and class struggles? There cannot be a new proletariat unless
it possesses in its purest form the realisation of childhood in
an adult world.

We are the discoverers of a world new and yet known, which lacks
the unity of space and time; a world still shot through with separations,
still fragmented. The semi-barbarity of our bodies, our needs
and our spontaneity (which is childhood enriched by awareness)
opens to us secret passages that centuries of aristocracy never
discovered, and which the bourgeoisie never even suspected. They
allow us to penetrate the maze of uncompleted civilisations and
all the embryonic supersessions conceived by a hidden history.
Our rediscovered childhood desires rediscover the childhood of
our desires. And from the savage depths of the past, always so
close and as yet unfulfilled, emerges a new geography of the passions.

3

Mobile within immobility, the time of unitary societies is cyclical.
People and things follow their course, moving along a circumference
whose centre is God. This pivot-God, unchangeable although nowhere
and everywhere, measures the duration of an eternal power. He
is His own standard, and the standard of everything which, gravitating
at an equal distance from Him, develops and returns without ever
really flowing away or even coming unwound. "The thirteenth
returns, and Is the first again."

The space of unitary societies is organised as a function of time.
Both time and space belong entirely to God. Space stretches from
the centre to the circumference, from heaven to earth, from the
One to the multiple. At first sight, time seems irrelevant, since
it neither brings God closer nor pushes Him further away. Space,
on the other hand, is the path towards God: the ascending path
of spiritual elevation and hierarchical promotion. Time really
belongs to God alone, but the space granted men keeps a specifically
human and irreducible nature. In fact, man can climb or descend,
rise in society or fall, assure his salvation or. risk damnation.
Space is the presence of man, the sphere of his relative freedom,
while time imprisons him within its circumference. And what is
the Last Judgement if not God bringing time back to Himself, the
centre sucking in the circumference and gathering in its immaterial
point the totality of the space imparted to His creatures? The
annihilation of human matter (its occupation of space),
is the project of the master who cannot totally possess his slave
and therefore cannot escape being partially possessed by him.

Duration keeps a tight hand on space; it drags us towards death,
eating away the space of our life. The distinction, however, doesn't
appear so clearly in the course of history. Feudal societies are
societies of separation just as much as bourgeois societies, since
separation is caused by privative appropriation; but feudal societies
have the advantage over bourgeois societies of an extraordinary
strength of dissimulation.

The power of myth reunites separated elements making live unitarily
though under false pretences. But the world of coherent myth is
a world where the inauthentic is One, and accepted unanimously
by a coherent community, be it tribe, clan or kingdom. God is
the image, the symbol of the supersession of dissociated space
and time, and everyone who "lives" in God takes part
in this supersession. The majority can only take part in a mediated
way, meaning that in the space of their daily lives, they, simple
mortals, obey God, priests and leaders, the organisers of duly
hierarchised space. In reward for submission, they are offered
eternal duration, the promise of duration without space, the assurance
of a pure temporality in God.

Others reckon this exchange to be a lousy deal. They have dreamt
of attaining the eternal present which absolute mastery over the
world confers. One is constantly struck by the analogy between
the synchronised space-time of children and the will to unity
of the great mystics. Thus Gregory of Palamas (1341) can describe
Illumination as a sort of immaterial consciousness of unity: "The
Light exists beyond space and time (...) He who shares in divine
energy becomes Light himself in a sense; he is united with the
Light and, with Light, he sees with perfect consciousness all
that remains hidden to those who have not received this grace."
This confused hope, which could only be Indistinct and even indescribable,
was popularised and made more specific by the transient bourgeois
era. It concretised it by killing off the aristocracy with its
spirituality, and gave it a chance by taking its own decomposition
to its logical conclusion. The history of separations is slowly
resolved in the end of separations. The feudal unitary illusion
is gradually embodied in the libertarian unity of the life to
be constructed, which lies beyond materially guaranteed survival.

4

Einstein's speculations on space and time remind us how dead God
is. When myth could no longer contain the dissociation of space
and time, the malaise to which consciousness was then subject
made Romanticism's heyday (viz. The attraction of far-off lands,
anguish at time's slipping away...)

How does the bourgeois mind conceive of time? No longer as God's
time, but rather as the time of power, fragmented power. Time
in shreds has a common measurement in the moment, which
attempts to recall cyclical time. The circumference no longer
exists; instead we have a finite and infinite straight line. In
place of everyone's synchronous regulation according to hours
fixed by God, there are succeeding states in which everyone is
chasing after himself but never catching up, as if the curse of
Becoming damned us to getting only a glimpse of the back while
the human face remains unknown and inaccessible, forever turned
towards the future. If there is no longer a circular space under
the all-seeing central eye of the Almighty, there is a series
of little points which appear autonomous but are in reality being
integrated in a ripple of succession along the line they trace
as each one joins on to the next.

Time flowed through the Mediaeval hourglass, but it was
the same sand which flowed back and forth from one globe to the
other. On the circular clock-face, time sheds its seeds
and never returns. An irony of forms: the new spirit took its
form from a dead reality, while the bourgeoisie is wearing the
death of time, specifically the death of its time, in its
wrist-watches as in the cheap finery of its humanist woolgathering,
both of which appear cyclical.

But nothing's made of it, so here we are in the age of watchmakers.
The economic imperative has converted man into a living chronometer,
distinguishing feature on his wrist. This is the time of work,
progress and output, production, consumption and programming;
it's time for the spectacle, for a kiss, or a photo, time for
anything (time is money). The time-commodity. Survival time.

Space is a point on the line of time, in the machine transforming
the future into the past. Time controls lived space, but controls
it externally, making it pass through, in transit. But the space
of individual life isn't pure space, nor is the time it sweeps
along pure temporality. This is worth examining in greater depth.

Each point terminating the line of time is unique and particular,
but as soon as the next point is added it is drowned in the uniform
line, swallowed up by a past with other pasts in its stomach.
It is impossible to distinguish them. Thus each point adds to
the line that makes it disappear.

Power ensures its duration on the model of destruction
and replacement, but at the same time those who are encouraged
to consume power destroy and renew it by enduring. If power
destroys everything, it destroys itself; and if it doesn't destroy
anything, it is destroyed. Only between the two poles of this
contradiction is there duration, and the dictatorship of the consumable
brings them closer every day. And its duration is subordinated
to the simple duration of men, or, in other words, to the permanence
of their survival. This is why the problem of dissociated space-time
is posed today in revolutionary terms.

Lived space may well be a universe of dreams and desires and prodigious
creatlvlty, but in the order of duration it is only one point
succeeding another; it flows on a precise duration - towards its
destruction. It appears, grows and disappears in the anonymous
line of the past where its corpse offers food for historians and
sudden jolts of memory.

The advantage of the lived point of space is that it partly escapes
the generalised system of conditioning; its disadvantag is that
it is nothing in itself. The space of daily life diverts a little
time to its own ends, it imprisons it and makes it its own. On
the other hand, time that flows away soaks into lived space and
interiorises the sense of transitoriness, of destructIon and death.
Let me explain.

The punctual space of daily life steals a part of "exterior"
time, thanks to which it creates a restricted unitary space-time:
it is the space-time of moments, of creativity, pleasure and orgasm.
The area of this alchemy is minute, but its lived intensity is
such that it exercises an unequaled fascination on most people.
In the eyes of power, which observe from outside, the passionate
moment is a quite insignificant point, an instant drained from
the future into the past. The line of objective time knows nothing
and wishes to know nothing of the present as immediate subjective
presence. And, in its turn, subjective life concentrated in the
space of a point - my joy, my pleasure, my daydreams - isn't interested
in time that flows away, in linear time, the time of things. On
the contrary, it wants to learn everything about its present -
for, after all, it is only a present.

Thus, lived space extracts, from the time sweeping it away, a
part with which it creates its present, or rather attempts to
for the present has always to be constructed.

It is the unitary space-time of love and poetry, of pleasure and
communication... It is lived experience without dead time. On
the other hand, linear time, objective time, time that flows away,
infuses in its turn the space imparted to everyday life. It is
introduced as negative time, as dead time, a reflection of the
time of destruction. It is the time of the role, the time
within life itself which encourages it to lose its character and
renounce authentically lived space, to hold back and prefer appearances
and the spectacular function. The space-time created by this hybrid
marriage is merely the space-time of survival.

What Is private life? It is, in any instant, on any point drawn
towards its destruction along the line of survival, the amalgam
of a real space-time (the moment) and a fake (the role). Obviously,
the structure of private life doesn't strictly conform to such
a dichotomy. There is permanent interaction. Thus the restrictions
that beset lived experience on every side, and compress it into
far too small a space, incite it to change itself into a role,
to enter the time that flows away as a commodity, become purely
repetitious, and create, as accelerated time, the fictitious space
of appearances. While at the same time the malaise born of inauthenticity,
space falsely lived, sends one back to search for real time, subjectivity's
time, which is the present. So private life is dialectically a
real lived time + a fictitious spectacular time + a fictitious
spectacular space + a real lived space.

The more fictitious time compounds with the fictitious space it
creates, the further one is heading towards the state of being
a thing and towards pure exchange value. The more the space of
authentic lived experience compounds with really lived time, the
stronger the mastery of man becomes.

Unitarily lived space-time is the guerilla's first base, the qualitative
spark in the night that's still concealing the revolution of daily
life.

Thus, not only does objective time furiously try to destroy punctual
space by hurling it into the past, but moreover it gnaws away
at it from inside by introducing this accelerated rhythm which
creates the substance of the role.

(The role's fictitious space in effect results from the rapid
repetition of an attitude, just as the repetition of a film image
makes it seem to live.) The role installs the time that flows
away, aging and death within subjective consciousness. This is
the "rut into which consciousness has been forced" which
Antonin Artaud talks about. Dominated from outside by linear time
and from inside by the role's time, subjectivity has nothing else
to do than become a thing, a valuable commodity. What's more,
the process speeds up through history. In fact, the role is henceforward
a consumption of time in a society where the time of consumption
is the only one acknowledged. And once again the unity of oppression
creates the unity of opposition. What is death today? Absence
of subjectivity and absence of the present.

The will to live always reacts unitarily. Most individuals really
divert time to the advantage of lived space. If their efforts
to intensify lived experience and increase the space-time of authenticity
don't get lost in confusion or break up in isolation, then perhaps
objective time, the time of death, can be smashed. Isn't the revolutionary
moment an eternal youth?

*

The project of enriching the space-time of lived experience must
analyse what impoverishes it. Linear time only has a hold over
men to the extent that it forbids them to transform the world,
and forces them to adapt to it. Freely radiating creativity is
power's public enemy number one.

And the strength of creativity lies in the unitary. How does power
try to break the unity of lived space-time? By transforming lived
experience into a commodity and throwing it on the market of the
spectacle at the mercy of the supply and demand of roles and stereotypes.
I examined this in the section devoted to the role (Chapter XV).
Also, by recourse to a particular means of identification: the
joint attraction of the past and future, which annihilates the
present. And, finally, by trying to recuperate within an Ideology
of history the will to construct the unitary space-time of lived
experience (in other words, the will to create situations worth
living). I will examine these two last points further.

*

From the viewpoint of power, there are no lived moments (lived
experience has no name), only instants succeeding one another
and all equal in the line of the past. A whole system of conditioning
broadcasts this attitude, hidden persuasion introjects it. And
here's the result. Just where is this present that people go on
about? In what forgotten corner of everyday life does it skulk?

If we're not looking on, we're looking forward or looking back.
The shade of my next meeting joins up with the shade of my last
one. Both haunt me. Every passing second drags me from the moment
that was to the moment that will be. Every second spirits me away
from myself; now never exists. A meaningless commotion makes sure
that everyone is "just passing through", or as we say
so prettily, "just passing the tlme", and even ensures
that time passes into man, through and through. When Schopenhauer
writes: "Before Kant, we were in time ; since Kant, time
is in us", he well expresses how aging and decrepitude permeate
men's consciousness. But it never occurs to Schopenhauer that
man's being torn to pieces on the rack of time reduced to the
apparent difference between future and past is exactly what's
pushing him, as a philosopher, to build up his mystique of despair.

Imagine the despair and giddiness of someone torn between two
instants which he is pursuing in zigzags, never catching them
up nor laying hold of himself. Or the despair of passionate expectation:
you are caught in the spell of some past moment, love, for Instance,
the woman you love is about to appear, you're sure of it, you
already feel her kisses... Passionate expectation is no more than
the shadow of the situation to be constructed. But one must admit
that most of the time the whirligig of memory and anticipation
gets in the way of expectation and the feeling of the present,
and instead starts up a mad run of dead and empty time.

Through power's telescope, the future is just the past rehashed.
A dollop of known inauthenticity is pushed forward by so-called
hopeful imagination into the time it is already filling up with
utter vacuity. One's only memories are of roles once played, and
one's only future an eternal remake. According to power, men's
memory should only operate within its time-scale, as a constant
reminder of its presence. A nihil novi sub sole, popularly
expressed as "someone must always be in charge".

The future advertised as "other time" is a worthy response
to the other space where I'm supposed to let myself relax. Change
time, change skin, change the hour. change the role; only alienation
doesn't change. Every time that I is another, I 'm hovering somewhere
between past and future. Roles never have a present. How could
one wish a role good morning? If I bungle my present - here being
always elsewhere - could I expect to find myself with a pleasant
past and future?

*

The crowning achievement of the identification with the past-future
is historical ideology, which causes individual and collective
will to develop on its head.

Time is one form of mental perception, clearly not one of man's
inventions but a dialectical relationship with outside reality;
it is therefore a tributary connection stemming from alienation
and man's struggle against it. Animals submit absolutely to adaptation
and are unaware of time. Man rejects adaptation and attempts to
transform the world. Every time he slips up in his desire to be
demiurge, he suffers the agony of having to adapt, the wrenching
pain when he feels reduced to the animal's passivity. Awareness
of necessary adaptation is awareness of time slipping away, which
is why time is so intimately tied up with human suffering. The
more his need to adapt to circumstances overrides the desire and
possibility of changing them, the more awareness of time grabs
him by the throat. What else is survival sickness except the acute
awareness of that other time and space slipping away, the awareness
of alienation? Rejecting the awareness of aging and the objective
conditions of aging awareness entails a much greater urgency on
the part of the will to remake history, with more consequence
and according to the wishes of everyone's subjectivity.

The sole reason for an historical ideology is to prevent men making
history themselves. How better to distract men away from their
present than by attracting them to where time flows away? This
is the historian's role. He organises the past, by breaking it
up according to the official line of time, then classifies events
according to ad hoc categories. These easy-to-use classifications
place the event in quarantine. Unshakable parentheses isolate
and contain it, stop it coming to life, being reborn and breaking
out again in the streets of our daily 1ife. The event is frozen.
One is forbidden to rejoin it, remake it, perfect it, lead it
on towards its supersession. It is just there, for all eternity
suspended for the appreciation of aesthetes. Slightly alter its
signification, and, hey presto! it can be transposed straight
into the future, which is just the historians repeating themselves.
The future they foretell is a collage of their memories. Vulgarised
by Stalinist thinkers, the famous concept of the Sense of History
has ended up leaving the future as drained of humanity as the
past.

Encouraged to identify himself with some other time and some other
person, today's individual has managed to have his present stolen
from him under the illusion of gaining a historical perspective.
In a spectacular space-time ("You are entering history, comrades.")
he loses the taste of authentic life. Yet, those who refuse the
heroism of historical action are warped by the complementary mystification
that the psychological sector bestows on them. These two categories
rub shoulders, and fuse in the extreme poverty of recuperation.
You choose: either history or a nice quiet life.

All roles are decaying, whether historical or not. The crisis
of history and the crisis of daily life coincide. The mixture
will be explosive. From now on we must divert history to subjective
ends; and with everyone's help. Marx really wished for nothing
less.

5

For nearly a century, significant pictural movements have been
playing about - even joking - with space. Nothing could express
so well the restless and passionate search for a new space to
inhabit as artistic creativity. And humour is surely the best
way to express the feeling that art could no longer provide a
valid solution. I'm thinking of the beginnings of Impressionism,
Pointillism, Fauvism, Cubism, the Dada collages, and the first
abstracts.

As art has decomposed, the number of people affected by the malaise
which was first of all felt by the artist has grown. Today, the
desire to construct an art of living has reached the level of
a popular demand. The researches of a whole artistic past, which
really have been so carelessly abandoned, must be incorporated
in a passionately lived space-time.

What I'm thinking of here are memories of mortal wounds. If you're
not busy being born you're busy rotting. The past is now irretrievable,
and the final twist of irony is that those who discuss it as if
it were definite fact are actually grinding it away, falsifying
and arranging it as fashion dictates. It's very reminiscent of
poor Wilson in Orwell's 1984 rewriting old official news items
which had been contradicted by a subsequent turn of events.

There's only one allowable way to forget, which is to wipe out
the past by realising it. Avert decomposition by supersession.
However time-honoured, facts never have the last word. A radical
change in the present is enough to make them topple off their
pedestals and fall at our feet. I know no more touching example
of the correction of the past than the one given by Victor Serge
in Ville Conquise; and I've no need to know a better one.

At the end of a lecture on the Paris Commune, given during the
height of the Bolshevik revolution, a soldier at the back of the
room lumbered up out of his armchair. "You could easily hear
his commanding rumble: 'Tell the story of Dr Millière's
execution.'
Standing up, a giant of a man, with his head bowed so that all
you could see of his face were his large hairy jowls, sullen mouth
and buckled wrinkled brows - he looked like one of those busts
of Beethoven - he listened to the story:
Dr Millière, in a dark blue overcoat and top hat, driven
in the rain through the Paris streets, - forced to kneel on the
steps of the Panthéon, - shouting 'Long live humanity!'
- the words of the Versailles sentry leaning on the railings a
few yards away:
'We'll fuck you with your humanity!'
In the black night of the unlit street the peasant came up to
the lecturer (...) His taciturn manner was gone. He had a secret
he wanted to share.
'I was also in Perm's government, last year when the Kulaks revolted
(...) On the way I'd read Arnould's pamphlet Les Morts de la
Commune.. It's a fine pamphlet. I was thinking about Millière.
I've avenged him, citizen! It was one of the best days of my life,
and I haven't had many of them. Point for point I've avenged him.
Like that on the steps of the church, I shot the biggest landowner
in the district; I've forgotten his name and I couldn't care less...'
After a short silence, he added - 'But it was me who shouted 'Long
live humanity!'"

Past revolts take on a new dimension in my present, that of an
immanent reality to be constructed immediately. The walks of the
Luxembourg palace and the square of the Tour Saint-jacques still
echo the shots and the cries of the suppressed Commune. But there
will be more shots fired and more heaps of corpses. One day the
revolutionaries of all the ages will join together with the revolutionaries
of all countries to wash the wall of the Fédérés
with the blood of firing squads.

To construct the present is to correct the past, change the psycho-geography
of the landscape, free dreams and unsatisfied desires from their
matrix, and bring all the separate passions together in harmony.
From the insurgents of 1525 to the Mulétist rebels, Spartacus
to Pancho Villa, Lucretius to Lautréamont, there's only
the time of my will to live.

Hope for tomorrow overshadows our festivities. The future is worse
than the Ocean - it contains nothing. Blue-print, program, long-term
view... count your chickens before you've even seen eggs. But
if you construct the present well the future will be more than
abundant.

Only the quick of the present, its multiplicity, interests me.
Despite all that might prevent me, I want to surround myself with
today as with a great light; and bring that other time and the
space of other people to the immediacy of everyday experience.
I wish to embody Schwester Katrei's formulation: "Everything
that is in me is also outside me and everywhere, around me; everything
belongs to me, and everywhere I can see only what lies within
me." That's no more than subjectivity's rightful triumph,
as far as history allows it today; however firmly we go about
tearing down the bastilles of the future and however thorough
our restructuring of the past, if only we could live each second
as if caught in the spell of eternal recurrence, it would exactly
and endlessly repeat itself.

Only the present can be total. A point of incredible density.
We must learn to slow down time and live the permanent passion
of immediate experience. A tennis champion tells the story how
once during a very tense match a ball was played that was very
difficult to take. Suddenly, he saw it approach slowed down, so
slowly that he had time to judge the situation, make a reasonable
decision and return it with masterful brilliance. In the space
of creation, time dilates. In inauthenticity, it speeds up. Whoever
possesses the poetry of the present will experience the same adventure
as the little Chinese boy who loved the Queen of the sea. He went
to look for her at the bottom of the ocean. When he returned to
the land he met an old man cutting roses who said to him: "My
grandfather told me of a young boy who disappeared in the sea,
and who had exactly the same name as you."

"Punctuality garners time" runs the esoteric tradition.
Passed through the developing tray of history, the phrase of the
Pistis Sophia - "One day of light is a million years
in the world" ~ is exactly Lenin's remark that some revolutionary
days are worth centuries.

It is always a matter of resolving the contradictions of the present,
not stopping half way and getting 'distracted', but going straight
for supersession. Collective work, the work of passion, the work
of poetry and the work of the game (Eternity is the world of the
game, said Boehme). However poor it may be, the present always
contains true wealth, the wealth of possible creation. But now
you know well enough - you live well enough - all the things that
tear out of my grasp this uninterrupted poem that is my joy.

Yield to the vortex of dead time, to age and decay till body and
mind are empty? Rather disappear in defiance of duration. In his
Précis de l'histoire universelle which appeared
in Paris in year VII of the Republic, citizen Anquetil tells of
a Persian prince who, wounded by the vanity of the world, withdrew
to a chateau with forty of the most beautiful and intelligent
courtisans of the kingdom. He died within a month, worn out by
too much pleasure. But what is death compared with this eternity?
If I have to die, at least let it be as I have loved.

The repressive unity of power is threefold: coercion, seduction
and mediation. This is no more than the inversion and perversion
of an equally threefold unitary project. The new society, as it
develops underground, chaotically, is moving towards a total honesty
- a transparency - between individuals: an honesty promoting the
participation of each individual in the self-realisation of everyone
else. Creativity, love and play stand in the same relation to
true life as the need to eat and the need to find shelter stand
in relation to survival (1). Attempts to realise oneself can only
be based on creativity (2). Attempts to communicate can only be
based on love (4). Attempts to participate can only be based on
play (6). Separated from one another these three projects merely
strengthen the repressive unity of power. Radical subjectivity
is the presence - which can be seen in almost everyone - of the
same desire to create a truly passionate life (3). The erotic
is the spontaneous coherence fusing attempts to enrich lived experience
(5).

1. - The construction of everyday life fuses reason and passion.
The plain confusion to which life has always been subject comes
from the mystification covering up the utter triviality of merely
continuing to exist. Will to live entails practical organisation.
Individual desire for a rich multidimensional life cannot be totally
divorced from a collective project. The oppression exercised by
human government is essentially threefold: coercion, alienating
mediation and magical seduction. The will to live also draws its
vitality and its coherence from the unity of a threefold project:
self-realisation, communication and participation.

If human history was neither reduced to, nor dissociated from,
the history of human survival, the dialectic of this threefold
project (in conjunction with the dialectic of the productive forces)
would prove sufficient explanation for most things men have done
to themselves and to one another. Every riot, every revolution,
reveals a passionate quest for exuberant life, for total honesty
between people, for a collective form of transformation of the
world. Today, one can see, throughout the whole of history, three
fundamental passions related to life in the same way that the
need to eat and find shelter are related to survival. The desire
to create, the desire to love and the desire to play interact
with the need to eat and find shelter, just as the will to live
never ceases to play havoc with the necessity of surviving. Obviously,
the importance of the part played by each element changes from
one time to another, but today their whole importance lies in
the extent to which they can be unified.

Today, with the Welfare State, the question of survival has become
only a part of the whole problem of life. As we hope to have shown.
Life-economy has gradually absorbed survival-economy, and in this
context the dissociation of the three projects, and of the passions
underlying them, appears more and more clearly as a consequence
of a fundamentally erroneous distinction between life and survival.
However, since the whole of existence is torn between two perspectives
- that of separation, of power; and that of revolution, of unity
- and is therefore essentially ambiguous, I am forced to discuss
each project at once separately and together.

*

The project of self-realisation is born of the passion of creativity,
in the moment when subjectivity wells up and wants to reign universally.
The project of communication is born of the passion of love, whenever
people discover in one another the selfsame will to conquest.
The project of participation is born of the passion of playing,
whenever group activity facilitates the self-realisation of each
individual.

Isolated, the three passions become perverted. Dissociated, the
three projects become falsified. The will to self-realisation
is turned into the will to power; sacrificed to status and role-playing,
it reigns in a world of restrictions and illusions. The will to
communication becomes objective dishonesty; based on relationships
between objects, it provides the field of operations for semiology,
the science of fucked-up communications. The will to participation
organises the loneliness of everyone in the lonely crowd; it creates
the tyranny of the illusory community.

Isolated, each passion is integrated in a metaphysical vision
which makes it absolute and, as such, leaves it completely out
of touch. Intellectuals can be funny when they try: they pull
the plug out and then announce that the electricity doesn't work.
Not in the least abashed they proceed to inform us that we're
really in the dark, and that's just all there is to it. Wherever
everything is separated from everything else, everything really
is impossible. Cartesian analysis can only produce the jerry-built.
The armies of Order can recruit only the crippled.

2. - The project of self-realisation

Assurance of security leaves unused a large supply of energy
formerly expended in the struggle for survival. The will to power
tries to recuperate, for the reinforcement of hierarchical slavery,
this free-floating energy which could be used for the blossoming
of individual life (l). Universal oppression forces almost everyone
to withdraw strategically towards what they feel to be their only
uncontaminated possession: their subjectivity. The revolution
of everyday life must create practical forms for the countless
attacks on the outside world launched daily by subjectivity (2).

1

The historic phase of privative appropriation stopped man being
the demiurge he was forced to create in an ideal form and thus
to confirm his own real failure. At heart everyone wants to be
God. To date we have merely prevented ourselves being so. I have
shown how hierarchical social organisation builds up the world
by breaking men down; how the perfection of its structure and
machinery makes it function like a giant computer whose programmers
are also programmed; how, lastly, the cybernetic state is the
coldest of all cold monsters.

In these conditions, the struggle for enough to eat, for comfort,
for stable employment and for security are, on the social front,
so many aggressive raids which slowly but surely are becoming
rearguard actions, despite their very real importance. The struggle
for survival took up and still takes up an amount of energy and
creativity which revolutionary society will inherit like a pack
of ravening wolves. Despite false conflicts and illusory activities,
a constantly stimulated creative energy is no longer being absorbed
fast enough by consumer society. What will happen to this vitality
suddenly at a loose end, to this surplus virility which neither
coercion nor lies can really continue to handle? No longer recuperated
by artistic and cultural consumption - by the ideological spectacle
- creativity will turn spontaneously against the very safeguards
of survival itself.

Rebels have only their survival to lose. And there are only two
ways in which they can lose it: either by living or by dying.
And since survival is no more than dying very slowly, there is
a temptation containing a very great deal of genuine feeling,
to speed the whole thing up and to die a damn sight faster. To
'live' negatively the negation of survival. Or, on the other hand,
to try to survive as an anti-survivor, focusing all one's energy
on breaking through to real life. To make survival no more than
the basis of a systematic quest for happiness.

Self-realisation is impossible in this world. Half demented rebellion
remains, for all its ferocity, a prisoner of the authoritarian
dilemma: survival or death. This half-rebellion, this savage creativity
so easily broken in by the order of things, is the will to
power.

*

The will to power is the project of self-realization falsified
- divorced from any attempt to communicate with, or to participate
in, the life of others. It is the passion of creating and of creating
oneself caught in the hierarchical system, condemned to turn the
treadmill of repression and appearances. Accepting being put down
because you can put others down in your turn. The hero is he who
sacrifices himself to the power of his role and his rifle. And
when, finally, he's burnt out, he follows Voltaire's advice and
cultivates his garden. Meantime his mediocrity has become a model
for the common rule of mortals.

The hero, the ruler, the superstar, the millionaire, the expert...
How many times have they sold out all they held most dear? How
many sacrifices have they made to force a few people, or a few
million people, people they quite rightly regard as complete idiots,
to have their photograph on the wall, to have their name remembered,
to be stared at in the street?

Yet, for all its bullshit, the will to power does contain traces
of an authentic will to live. Think of the virtú
of the condottiere, of the Titans of the Renaissance. But
the condottiere are dead and buried. All that's left is
industrial magnates, gangsters and hired guns, dealers in art
and artillery. The adventurer and the explorer are comic-strip
characters (Tin-tin and Schweitzer). And it's with these people
that Zarathustra dreamt of peopling the heights of Sils-Maria;
it's in these abortions he thought he could see the lineaments
of a future race. Nietzsche is, in fact, the last master, crucified
by his own illusions. His death was a replay, with more brio,
and in slightly better taste, of the black comedy of Golgotha.
It explains the disappearance of the feudal lords just as the
death of Christ explained the disappearance of God. Nietzsche
may have had a refined sensibility but the stench of Christianity
didn't stop him breathing it in by the lungful. And he pretends
not to understand that Christianity, however much contempt it
may have poured on the will to power, is in fact its best means
of protection, its most faithful bodyguard, since it stands in
the way of the appearance of masters who no longer need slaves
to be masters. Nietzsche blessed a world in which the will to
live is condemned never to be more than the will to power. His
last letters were signed 'Dionysus the Crucified'. He too was
looking for someone to assume responsibility for his broken zest.
You don't mess with the witch-doctor of Bethlehem.

Nazism is Nietzschean logic called to order by history. The question
was: what can become of those who wish to live like a lord in
a society from which all true rulers have disappeared? And the
answer: a super-slave. Nietzsche's concept of the superman, however
threadbare it may have been, is worlds apart from what we know
of the domestics who ran the Third Reich. Fascism knows only one
superman: the State.

The State superman is the strength of the weak. This is why the
desires of an isolated individual can always fit I 'n with a role
played impeccably in the official spectacle. The will to power
is an exhibitionistic will. The isolated individual detests other
people, feels contempt for the masses of which he is a perfect
specimen himself. He is, in fact, the most contemptible man of
all. Showing off, amidst the crassest sort of illusory community,
is his 'dynamism'; the rat-race, his 'love of danger'.

The manager, the leader, the tough guy, the mobster know little
joy. Ability to endure is their main qualification. Their morale
is that of pioneers, of spies, of scouts, of the shock-troops
of conformity. "NO animal would have done what I have done..."
What is the gangster-trip? A will to appear since one cannot be;
a way of escaping the emptiness of one's own existence by running
greater and greater risks. But only servants are proud of their
sacrifices. Here the part rules the whole: sometimes the artificial
being of the role, sometimes the directness of the animal. And
the animal does what the man cannot do. The heroes who march past,
colours flying, the Red Army, the S.S., the U.S. marines, these
are the same people who burnt and cut living flesh at Budapest,
at Warsaw, at Algiers. Army discipline is based on the uptightness
of the rank and file. Cops know when to snarl and when to fawn.

The will to power is a compensation for slavery. At the same time
it is a hatred of slavery. The most striking 'personalities' of
the past never identified themselves with a Cause. They just used
Causes to further their own personal hunger for power. But as
great Causes began to break up and disappear, so did the ambitious
individuals concerned. However, the game goes on. People rely
on Causes because they haven't been able to make their own life
a Cause sufficient unto itself. Through the Cause and the sacrifice
it entails they stagger along, backwards, trying to find their
own will to live.

Sometimes desire for freedom and for play breaks out among law
and order's conscripts. I am thinking of Salvatore Giuliano, before
he was recuperated by the landowners, of Billy the Kid, of various
gangsters momentarily close to the anarchist terrorists. Legionnaires
and mercenaries have defected to the side of Algerian or Congolese
rebels, thus choosing the party of open insurrection and taking
their desire to play to its logical conclusion: blowing their
whole scene sky-high, and jumping into the dark.

I also have teenage gangs in mind. The very childishness of their
will to power has often kept their will to live almost uncontaminated.
Obviously the delinquent is threatened with recuperation. Firstly,
as a consumer, because he wants things he cannot afford to buy;
then, as he gets older, as a producer. But, within the gang, playing
remains of such great importance that truly revolutionary consciousness
can never be far away. If the violence inherent in teenage gangs
stopped squandering itself in exhibitionistic and generally half-baked
brawls and rave-ups and only saw how much real poetry was to be
found in a riot, then their gameplaying, as it became increasingly
riotous, would almost certainly set off a chain reaction: a qualitative
flash. Almost everyone is fed up with their life. Almost everyone
is sick of being pushed around. Almost everyone is sick of the
lies they come out with all day long. All that is needed is a
spark - plus tactics. Should delinquents arrive at revolutionary
consciousness simply through understanding what they already are,
and by wanting to be more so, then it's quite possible that they
could prove the key-factor in a general social retake on reality.
This could be vitally important. Actually, all that's really necessary
is the federation of their gangs.

2

So far the heart of life has been sought anywhere but in the heart
of man. Creativity has always been pushed to one side. It has
been suburban; and, in fact, urbanism reflects very accurately
the misadventures of the axis around which life has been organised
for thousands of years. The first cities grew up around a stronghold
or sacred spot, a temple or a church, a point where heaven and
earth converged. Industrial towns, with their mean, dark streets
surround a factory or industrial plant; administrative centres
preside over empty rectilinear avenues. Finally, the most recent
examples of town-planning simply have no centre at all. It's becoming
increasingly obvious: the reference point they propose is always
somewhere else. These are labyrinths in which you are allowed
only to lose yourself. No games, No meetings. No living. A desert
of plate-glass. A grid of roads. High-rise apartment blocks.

Oppression is no longer centralised because oppression is everywhere.
The positive aspects of this: everyone begins to see, in conditions
of almost total isolation, that first and foremost it is themselves
that they have to save, themselves that they have to choose as
the centre, their own subjectivity out of which they have to build
a world that everyone else will recognise as their native land.

One can only rediscover other people by consciously rediscovering
oneself. For as long as individual creativity is not at
the centre of social life, man's only freedom will be freedom
to destroy and be destroyed. If you do other people's thinking
for them, they will do your thinking for you. And he who thinks
for you judges you, he reduces you to his own norm and, whatever
his intentions may be, he will end by making you stupid - for
stupidity doesn't come from a lack of intelligence, as stupid
people imagine it does, it comes from renouncing, from abandoning
one's own true self. So if anyone asks you what you are doing,
asks you to explain yourself, treat him as a judge - that is to
say, as an enemy.

"I want someone to succeed me; I want children; I want disciples;
I want a father; I don't want myself". A few words from those
high on Christianity, whether the Roman or the Peking brand. Only
unhappiness and neurosis can follow. My subjectivity is too important
for me to take my lack of inhibition to the point of either asking
other people for their help or of refusing it when it is offered.
The point is neither to lose oneself in oneself nor to lose oneself
in other people. Anyone who realises that his problems are ultimately
social in nature must first of all find himself. Otherwise he
will find nothing in other people apart from his own absence.

Nothing is more difficult, or more painful, to approach than the
question of one's own self-regeneration. In the heart of each
human being there is a hidden room, a camera obscura, to
which only the mind and dreams can find the door. A magic circle
in which the world and the self are reconciled where every childish
wish comes true. The passions flower there, brilliant, poisonous
blossoms clinging to and thriving on air, thin air. I create a
universe for myself and, like some fantastic tyrannical God, people
it with beings who will never live for anyone else. One of my
favourite James Thurber stories is the one where Walter Mitty
dreams that he is a swashbuckling captain, then an eminent surgeon,
then a coldblooded killer and finally a war hero. All this as
he drove his old Buick downtown to buy some dog biscuits.

The real importance of subjectivity can easily be measured by
the general embarassment with which it is approached. Everyone
wants to pass it off as their mind 'wandering', as 'introversion',
as 'being stoned'. Everyone censors their own daydreams. But isn't
it the phantoms and visions of the mind that have dealt the most
deadly blows at morality, authority, language and our collective
hypnotic sleep? Isn't a fertile imagination the source of all
creativity, the alembic distilling the quick of life: the bridgehead
driven into the old world and across which the coming invasions
will pour?

Anyone who can be open-minded about their interior life will begin
to see a different world outside themselves values change, things
lose their glamour and become plain instruments. In the magic
of the imaginary, things exist only to be picked up and toyed
with, caressed, broken apart and put together again in any way
one sees fit. Once the prime importance of subjectivity is accepted
the spell cast upon things is broken. Starting from other people,
one's self-pursuit is fruitless, one repeats the same futile gestures
time after time. Starting from oneself, on the contrary, gestures
are not repeated but taken back into oneself, corrected and realised
in a more highly evolved form.

Daydreaming could become the most powerful dynamo in the world.
Modern technological expertise, just as it makes everything considered
'Utopian' in the past a purely practical undertaking today, also
does away with the purely fairytale nature of dreams. All my wishes
can come true from the moment that modern technology is put to
their service.

And even deprived of these techniques, can subjectivity ever stray
far from the truth? it is possible for me to objectify all that
I have dreamt of being. Everyone, at least once in his life has
pulled off the same sort of thing as Lassailly or Nechaev; Lassailly,
passing himself off as the author of an unwritten book, ends up
by becoming a real writer, author of the Roueries de Trialph;
Nechaev, touching Bakunin for money in the name of a nonexistent
terrorist organisation, finally does get a real group of nihilists
going. One day I must be as I have wanted to seem; the particular
spectacular role I have so long wanted to be will become genuine.
Thus subjectivity subverts roles and spectacular lies to its own
ends: it reinvests appearances in reality.

Subjective imagination is not purely spiritual: it is always seeking
its practical realisation. There can be no doubt that the artistic
spectacle - above all, in its narrative forms - plays on subjectivity's
quest for its own self-realisation, but solely by captivating
it, by making it function in terms of passive identification.
Debord's agitational film Critique de la séparation
stresses the point: "Normally, the things that happen to
us, things which really do involve us and demand our attention,
leave us no more than bored and distant spectators. However, almost
any situation, once it has been transposed artistically, awakens
our attention: we want to take part in it, to change it. This
paradox must be turned upside down - put back on its feet."
The forces of the artistic spectacle must be dissolved and their
equipment pass into the arsenal of individual dreams. Once armed
in this way, there will no longer be any question of treating
them as phantasies. This is the only way in which the problem
of making art real can be seen.

3. Radical Subjectivity

Each subjectivity is different from every other one, but all
obey the same wilt to self-realisation. The problem is one of
setting their variety in a common direction, of creating a united
front of subjectivity. Any attempt to build a new life is subject
to two conditions: first, that the realisation of each individual
subjectivity will either take place in a collective form or it
will not take place at all; and, secondly, that "To tell
the truth, the only reason anyone fights is for what they love.
Fighting for everyone else is only the consequence." (Saint-Just)

My subjectivity feeds on events. The most varied events: a riot,
a sexual fiasco, a meeting, a memory, a rotten tooth. Reality,
as it evolves, sweeps me with it. I'm struck by everything and,
though not everything strikes me in the same way, I am always
struck by the same basic contradiction: although I can always
see how beautiful anything could be if only I could change it,
in practically every case there is nothing I can really do. Everything
is changed into something else in my imagination, then the dead
weight of things changes it back into what it was in the first
place. A bridge between imagination and reality must be built.
Only a truly radical perspective can give everyone the right to
make anything out of anything. A radical perspective grasps men
by their roots and the roots of men lie in their subjectivity
- this unique zone they possess in common.

You can't make it on your own. You can't live your own life to
the full in isolation. But can any individual - any individual
who has got anything at all straight about himself and the world
- fail to see a will identical to his own among everyone he knows:
the same journey leaving from the same place?

All forms of hierarchical power differ from one another and yet
all betray a fundamental identity in their oppressive nature.
In the same way, all subjectivities are different from one another
and yet all reveal a fundamental identity in their will to total
self-realisation. Only because of this can one speak of a real
"radical subjectivity".

There is a common root to every subjectivity, though all are unique
and irreducible: the will to realise oneself by transforming the
world, the will to live every sensation, every experience, every
possibility to the full. This can be seen in everyone, at different
stages of consciousness and determination. Its real power depends
on the degree of collective unity it can attain without losing
its variety. Consciousness of this necessary unity comes from
what one could call a reflex of identity - the diametrically
opposite movement to that of identification. Through identification
we lose our uniqueness in the variety of roles; through the reflex
of identity we strengthen our wealth of individual possibilities
in the unity of federated subjectivities.

Radical subjectivity can only be based on the reflex of identlty.
One's own quest searches for itself everywhere in others. "While
I was on a mission in the state of Tchou", says Confucius,
"I saw some piglets suckling their dead mother. After a short
while they shuddered and went away. They had sensed that she could
no longer see them and that she wasn't like them any more.
What they loved in their mother wasn't her body, but whatever
it was that made her body live." Likewise, what I am looking
for in other people is the richest part of myself hidden within
them. Can the reflex of identity spread naturally? One can only
hope so. Certainly it's high time for it.

No one has ever questioned the interest men take in being fed,
sheltered, cared for, protected from hardship and disaster. The
imperfections of technology - transformed at a very early date
into social imperfections - have postponed the satisfaction of
this universal desire. Today, planned economy allows one to foresee
the final solution of the problems of survival. Now that the needs
of survival are well on the way to being satisfied, at least in
the hyper-industrialised countries, it is becoming painfully obvious,
to say the least of it, that there are also human passions which
must be satisfied, that the satisfaction of these passions is
of vital importance to everyone and, furthermore, that failure
to do so will undermine, if not destroy, all our acquisitions
in terms of material survival. As the problems of survival are
slowly but surely resolved they begin to clash more and more brutally
with the problems of life which have been, just as slowly and
just as surely, sacrificed to the needs of survival. The chickens
are all coming home to roost: henceforward, socialist-type planning
is opposed to the true harmonisation of life in common.

*

Radical subjectivity is the common front of rediscovered identity.
Those who can't see themselves in other people are condemned for
ever to be strangers to themselves. I can't do anything for other
people if they can't do anything for themselves. It's along these
lines that concepts such as those of 'cognition' and 're-cognition',
of 'sympathy' and 'sympathising', should be re-examined.

Cognition is only of value if it leads to the re-cognition of
a common project - to the reflex of identity. To realise radical
imagination requires a varied knowledge, but this knowledge is
nothing without the style with which it is handled. As the first
years of the S.I. have shown, the worst crises within a coherent
revolutionary group are caused by those closest by their knowledge
and furthest away by their lived experience and by the importance
they place upon it. Likewise, 'partisans'. They both identify
themselves with the group and get in its way. They understand
everything except what is really at stake. They demand knowledge
because they are incapable of demanding themselves.

By seizing myself, I break other people's hold over me. Thus I
let them see themselves in me. No one can evolve freely without
spreading freedom in the world.

"I want to be myself. I want to walk without impediment.
I want to affirm myself alone in my freedom. May everyone do likewise.
Don't worry any more about the fate of the revolution - it will
be safer in the hands of everyone than in the hands of political
parties." So said Coeurderoy. I agree one hundred per cent.
Nothing authorises me to speak in the name of other people. I
am only my own delegate. Yet at the same time I can't help thinking
that my life isn't solely my own concern but that I serve the
interests of thousands of other people by living the way I live,
and by struggling to live more intensely and more freely. My friends
and I are one, and we know it. Each of us is acting for each other
by acting for himself. Honesty is our only hope.

4. The project of communication

Love offers the purest glimpse of true communication that any
of us have had. But, as communication in general tends to break
down more and more, the existence of love becomes increasingly
precarious. It is threatened on every side. Everything tends to
reduce lovers to objects; real meetings are replaced by mechanical
sex: by the posturing of countless Playboys and Bunnies. Really
being in love means really wanting to live in a different world.

Although the three passions underlying the threefold project of
self-realisation, communication and participation are of equal
importance, they have not been repressed to an equal extent. While
creativity and play have been blighted by prohibitions and by
every sort of distortion, love, without escaping from repression,
still remains relatively the most free experience. The most democratic,
all in all.

Love offers the model of perfect communication: the orgasm, the
total fusion of two separate beings. It is a glimpse of a transformed
universe. Its intensity, its here-and-now-ness, its physical exaltation,
its emotional fluidity, its grateful acceptance of the value of
change - everything indicates that love will prove the key factor
in recreating the world. Our emotionally-dead survival cries out
for multidimensional passions. Lovemaking sums up and distils
both the desire for, and the reality of, such a way of life. The
universe lovers build of dreams and one another's bodies is a
transparent universe: lovers want to be at home everywhere.

Love has been able to stay free more successfully than the other
passions. Creativity and play have always 'been granted' an official
representation, a spectacular acknowledgment which did its best
to cut them off at their source. Love has always been clandestine
- "being alone together". It turned out to be protected
by the bourgeois concept of private life; banished from the day,
reserved for work and for consumption, and driven into the darkest
corners of the night; lit by the moon. Thus it partly escaped
the major mopping-up of daily activities. The same cannot be said
for communication, and it is precisely the ashes of false (daily)
communication that choke the spark of sexual passion. And today
consumer society is extending falsification further and further...
into the reaches of the night...

*

People who talk about 'communication' when there are only things
and their mechanical relations are working on the side of the
process of reification that they pretend to attack. 'Understanding',
'friendship', 'being happy together' - so much bullshit. All I
can see is exploiters and exploited, rulers and ruled, actors
and spectators. And all of them flailed like chaff by Power.

Things aren't necessarily expressionless. Anything can become
human if someone infuses it with their own subjectivity. But in
a world ruled by privative appropriation, the only function of
the object is to justify its proprietor. If my subjectivity overflows,
if my eyes make the landscape their own, it can only be ideally,
without material or legal consequences. In the perspective of
power, people and things aren't there for my enjoyment, but to
serve a master; nothing really is, everything functions
as part of an order of possessions.

There can't be any real communication in a world where almost
everything one does is ruled by fetishes. The space between people
and things isn't empty: it's packed with alienating mediations.
And as power becomes increasingly abstract its own signals become
so numerous, so chaotic, as to demand systematic interpretation
on the part of a body of scribes, semanticians and mythologists.
Brought up to see only objects around him, the proprietor needs
objective and objectified servants. Only subjective truth, as
historically it becomes objective, can withstand this sort of
thing. One must start with immediate experience itself if one
wants to attack the most advanced points to which repression has
penetrated.

*

The main pleasure of the middle class seems to have been degrading
pleasure in all its forms. It wasn't enough to imprison people's
freedom to fall in love in the squalid ownership of marriage (interlarded
of course with the occasional one-night stand). It wasn't enough
to set things up so that dishonesty and jealousy were bound to
follow. The great thing was to sabotage people on the few occasions
they really did meet.

Love's despair doesn't come from sexual frustration. It comes
from suddenly losing contact with the person in your arms; of
both of you suddenly seeing one another as an object. Swedish
social democracy, as hygienic as ever, has already got its own
horrible caricature of free love out on the market: one-night
stands dealt out like a deck of cards.

How sickening these endless lies one says and hears! How much
one wants to be straight with someone! Sex really does seem to
be our only break. Sometimes I think that nothing else is as real,
nothing else is as human, as the feel of a woman's body, the softness
of her skin, the warmth and wetness of her cunt. Even if there
were nothing else at all, this alone would be enough for ever.

But even during really magical moments the inert mass of objects
can suddenly become magnetic. The passivity of a lover suddenly
unravels the bonds which were being woven, the dialogue is interrupted
before it really began. Love's dialectic freezes. Two statues
are left lying side by side. Two objects.

Although love is always born of subjectivity - a girl is beautiful
because I love her - my desire cannot stop itself objectifying
what it wants. Desire always makes an object of the loved person.
But if I let my desire transform the loved person into an object,
have I not condemned myself to conflict with this object and,
through force of habit, to become detached from it?

What can ensure perfect communication between lovers? The union
of these opposites:

- the more I detach myself from the object of my desire and the
more objective strength I give to my desire, the more carefree
my desire becomes towards its object;

- the more I detach myself from my desire insofar as it is an
object and the more objective strength I give to the object of
my desire, the more my desire finds its raison d'etre in
the loved person.

Socially, this playing with one's own attitudes could be expressed
by changing partners at the same time as one is attached more
or less permanently to a 'pivotal' partner. All these meetings
would be the communication of a single purpose experienced in
common. I have always wanted to be able to say: "I know you
don't love me because you only love yourself. I am just the same.
So love me."

Love can only be based on radical subjectivity. The time is up
for all self-sacrificial forms of love. To love only oneself through
other people, to be loved by others through the love they owe
themselves. This is what the passion of love teaches; these are
the only conditions of authentic communication.

*

And love is also an adventure; an attempt to breakfree of dishonesty.
To approach a woman in any spectacular, exhibitionistic way, is
to condemn oneself to a reified relationship from the very first.
The choice is between spectacular seduction - that of the playboy
- and the seduction exercised by something that is qualitatively
different - the person who is seductive because he isn't trying
to seduce.

Sade analyses two possible attitudes. On the one hand, the libertines
of the 120 Days of Sodom who can only really enjoy themselves
by torturing to death the object they have seduced (and what more
fitting homage to a thing than to make it suffer?); or, on the
other, the libertines of the Philosophy in the Boudoir,
warm and playful, who do all they can to increase one another's
pleasure. The former are the feudal-type lords, vibrant with hatred
and revolt; the latter, the masters without slaves, discovering
in one another only the reflection of their own pleasure.

Today, seduction tends to become increasingly sadistic. Sadism
is inability to forgive the desired person for being an object.
Truly seductive people, on the contrary, contain the fullness
of desire in themselves; they refuse to play a part and owe their
seductiveness to this refusal. In Sade, this would be Dolmancé,
Eugénie or Madame de Saint-Ange. This plenitude can only
exist for the desired person if they can recognise their own will
to live in the person who desires them. Real seduction seduces
only by its honesty. And not everyone is worth seducing. This
is what the Beguines of Schweidnitz and their companions
(13th century) meant by saying that resistance to sexual advances
was the sign of a crass spirit. The Brethren of the Free Spirit
expressed the same idea: "Anyone who knows the God inhabiting
him carries his own Heaven in himself. By the same token, ignorance
of one's own divinity really is a mortal sin. This is the meaning
of the Hell which one carries with oneself in earthly life."

Hell is the emptiness left by separation, the anguish of lovers
lying side by side without being together. Non-communication is
always like the collapse of a revolutionary movement. The will
to death is installed where the will to life has disappeared.

*

Love must be freed from its myths, from its images, from its spectacular
categories; its authenticity must be strengthened and its spontaneity
renewed. There is no other way of fighting its reification and
its recuperation in the spectacle. Love can't stand either isolation
or fragmentation; it is bound to overflow into the will to transform
the whole of human activity, into the necessity of building a
world where lovers feel themselves to be free everywhere.

The birth and the dissolution of the moment of love are bound
to the dialectic of memory and desire. At first, desire and the
possibility of its reciprocation strengthen one another. In the
moment of love itself, memory and desire coincide. The
moment of love is the space-time of authentic lived experience,
a present containing both the past and the future. At the stage
of breaking-up, memory prolongs the impassioned moment but
desire gradually ebbs away. The present disintegrates, memory
turns nostalgically towards past happiness, while desire foresees
the unhappiness to come. In dissolution the separation
is real. The failure of the recent past cannot be forgotten and
desire gradually melts away.

In love, as in every attempt to communicate, the problem is avoiding
the stage of breaking up. One could suggest:

- developing the moment of love as far as one can, in as many
directions as possible; in other words, refusing to dissociate
it from either creativity or play, raising it from the state of
a moment to that of the real construction of a situation;

- promoting collective experiments in individual realisation;
thus of multiplying the possibilities of sexual attraction by
bringing together a great variety of possible partners;

- permanently strengthening the pleasure-principle, which is the
life-blood of every attempt to realise oneself, to communicate
or to participate. Pleasure is the principle of unification. Love
is desire for unity in a common moment; friendship, desire for
unity in a common project.

5. The erotic or the dialectic of pleasure

There is no pleasure which is not seeking its own coherence.
Its interruption, its lack of satisfaction, causes a disturbance
analogous to Reichian 'stasis'. Repression keeps human beings
in a state of permanent crisis. Thus the function of pleasure,
and of the anxiety born in its absence, is essentially a social
function. The erotic is the development of the passions as they
become unitary, a game of unity and variety, without which revolutionary
coherence cannot exist ("Boredom is always counter-revolutionary"
- I.S. no. 3).

Wilhelm Reich attributes most of neurotic behaviour to disturbances
of the orgasm, to what he called 'orgastic impotence'. He maintains
that anxiety is created by inability to experience a complete
orgasm, by a sexual discharge which fails to liquidate all the
excitement, all the foreplay, leading up to it. The accumulated
arid unspent energy becomes free-floating and is converted into
anxiety. Anxiety in its turn still further impedes future orgastic
potency.

But the problem of tensions and their liquidation doesn't just
exist on the level of sexuality. It characterises all human relationships.
And Reich, although he sensed that this was so, fails to emphasise
strongly enough that the present social crisis is also a crisis
of an orgastic nature. If "the source of neurotic energy
lies in the disparity between the accumulatiorn and the discharge
of sexual energy", it seems to me that the source of energy
of our neuroses is also to be found in the disparity between the
accumulation and the discharge of the energy brought into use
by human relationships. Total enjoyment is still possible in the
moment of love, but as soon as one tries to prolong this moment,
to extend it into social life itself, one cannot avoid what Reich
called 'stasis'. The world of the dissatisfactory and the unconsummated
is a world of permanent crisis. What would a society without neurosis
be like? An endless banquet. Pleasure is the only guide.

*

"Everything is feminine in what one loves", wrote La
Mettrie, "the empire of love recognises no other frontiers
than those of pleasure". But pleasure itself doesn't recognise
any frontiers. If it isn't growing, it is beginning to disappear.
Repetition kills it; it can't adapt itself to the fragmentary.
The principle of pleasure cannot be separated from the totality.

The erotic is pleasure seeking its coherence. It's the development
of passions becoming communicative, interdependent, unitary. The
problem is recreating in social life that state of total enjoyment
known in the moment of love. Conditions allowing a game with unity
and variety, that is to say, free and transparent participation
in particular achievements.

Freud defined the goal of Eros as unification or the search for
union. But when he maintains that fear of being separated and
expelled from the group comes from an underlying fear of castration,
his proposition should be inverted. Fear of castration comes from
the fear of being excluded, not the other way round. This anxiety
becomes more marked as the isolation of individuals in an illusory
community becomes more and more difficult to ignore.

Even while it seeks unification, Eros is essentially narcissistic
and in love with itself. It wants a world to love as much as it
loves itself. Norman O. Brown, in Life Against Death, points
out the contradiction. How, he asks, can a narcissistic orientation
lead to union with beings in the world? "in love, the abstract
antimony of the Ego and the Other can be transcended if we return
to the concrete reality of pleasure, to a definition of sexuality
as being essentially a pleasurable activity of the body, and if
we see love as the relationship between the Ego and the sources
of pleasure." One could be more exact: the source of pleasure
lies less in the body than in the possibility of free activity
in the world. The concrete reality of pleasure is based on the
freedom to unite oneself with anyone who allows one to become
united with oneself. The realisation of pleasure passes through
the pleasure of realisation, the pleasure of communication through
the communication of pleasure, participation in pleasure through
the pleasure of participation. It is because of this that the
narcissism turned towards the outside world, the narcissism Brown
is talking about, can only bring about a wholesale demolition
of social structures.

The more intense pleasure becomes the more it demands the whole
world. "Lovers, seek greater and greater pleasure,"
said Breton. This is a revolutionary demand.

Western civilisation is a civilisation of work and, as Diogenes
observed: "Love is the occupation of the unoccupied."
With the gradual disappearance of forced labour, love takes on
a greater and greater importance. It has become the major resource
to develop. And it poses a direct threat to every kind of authority.
Because the erotic is unitary, it is also acceptance of change.
Freedom knows no propaganda more effective than people calmly
enjoying themselves. Which is why pleasure, for the most part,
is forced to be clandestine, love locked away in a bedroom, creativity
confined to the back-stairs of culture, and alcohol and drugs
cower under the shadow of the outstretched arm of the law...

The morality of survival has condemned both the diversity of pleasures
and their union-in-variety in order to promote obsessive repetition.
But if pleasure-anxiety is satisfied with the repetitive, true
pleasure can only exist in terms of diversity-within-unity. Clearly
the simplest model of the erotic is the pivotal couple. Two people
live their experiences as honestly and as freely as possible.
This radiant complicity has all the charm of incest. Their wealth
of common experiences can only lead to a brother and sister relationship.
Great loves have always had something incestuous about them; one
could deduce that love between brothers and sisters was privileged
from the very first, and that it should be worked on in every
possible manner. It's high time to break this, the most ancient
and ugliest of all taboos, and to break it once and for all. The
process could be described as sororisation. A wife and
a sister all of whose friends are also my wives and sisters

In the erotic, there is no perversion apart from the negation
of pleasure: its distortion into pleasure-anxiety. What matters
the spring so long as the water is pure? As the Chinese say: Immobile
in one another, pleasure bears us.

And, finally, the search for pleasure is the best safeguard of
play. It defends real participation, it protects it against self-sacrifice,
coercion and dishonesty. The actual degree of intensity pleasure
reaches marks subjectivity's grasp on the world. Thus, flirtatiousness
is playing with desire as it is born; desire, playing with passion
as it is born. And playing with passion finds its coherence in
poetry, whose essentially revolutionary nature can never be over-emphasised.

Does this mean that the search for pleasure is incompatible with
pain? On the contrary, it's a question of re-inventing pain. Pleasure-anxiety
is neither pleasure nor pain; it's just scratching yourself and
letting the itch get worse and worse. What is real pain? A set-back
in the game of desire or passion; a positive pain crying out with
a corresponding degree of passion for another pleasure to construct.
A delay in full participation.

6. The project of participation

A society based on organised survival can only tolerate false,
spectacular forms of play. But given the crisis of the spectacle,
playfulness, distorted in every imaginable way, is being reborn
everywhere. From now on it has all the features of social upheaval
and, beyond its negativity, the foundations of a society of real
participation can be detected. To play means to refuse leaders,
self-sacrifice and roles, to embrace every form of self-realisation
and to be utterly, painfully, honest with all one's friends (1).
Tactics are the polemical stage of the game. Individual creativity
needs an organisation concentrating and strengthening it. Tactics
entail a certain kind of hedonistic foresight. The point of every
fragmentary action must be the total destruction of the enemy.
Industrial societies have to evolve their own specific forms of
guerilla warfare (2). Diversion is the only possible revolutionary
use of the spiritual and material values distributed by consumer
society: supersession's ultimate deterrent (3).

1

Economic necessity and play don't mix. Financial transactions
are deadly serious: you don't fool around with money. The elements
of play contained within feudal economy were gradually squeezed
out by the rationality of money exchanges. Playing with exchange
means to barter products without worrying too much about strictly
standardised equivalents. But from the moment that capitalism
forced its commercial relationships on the world, fantasy was
forbidden; and the dictatorship of commodities today shows clearly
that it intends to enforce these relationships everywhere, at
every level of life.

The pastoral relationships of country life in the high Middle
Ages tempered the purely economic necessities of feudalism with
a sort of freedom; play often took the upper hand even in menial
tasks, in the dispensing of justice, in the settling of debts.
By throwing the whole of everyday life onto the battlefield of
production and consumption, capitalism crushes the urge to play
while at the same time trying to harness it as a source of profit.
So, over the last few decades, we have seen the attraction of
the unknown turned into mass-tourism, adventure turned into scientific
expeditions and the great game of war turned into strategic operations.
Taste for change now rests content with a change of taste...

Contemporary society has banned all real play. It. has been turned
into something only children do. And today children themselves
are getting more and more pacifying gadget-type toys rammed down
their throats. The adult is only allowed falsified and recuperated
games: competitions, T.V. sport, elections, gambling... Yet at
the same time it's obvious that this kind of rubbish can never
satisfy anything as strong as people's desire to play - especially
today when game-playing could flourish as never before in history.

The sacred knows how to cope with the profane and deconsecrated
game: witness the irreverent and obscene carvings in cathedrals.
Without concealing them, the Church embraced cynical laughter,
biting fantasy and nihilistic scorn. Under its mantle the demonic
game was safe. Bourgeois power, on the contrary, puts play in
quarantine, isolates it in a special ward, as if it wanted to
stop it infecting other human activities. Art is this privileged
and despised area set apart from commerce. And it will stay that
way until economic imperialism refits it in its turn as a spiritual
supermarket. Then, hunted down everywhere, play will burst out
everywhere.

It was in fact from art that play broke free. The eruption was
called Dada. "The dadaist events awoke the primitive-irrational
play instinct which had been held down an the audience",
said Hugo Ball. On the fatal slope of plague and mockery Art dragged
down in its fall the whole edifice which the Spirit of Seriousness
had built to the greater glory of the bourgeoisie. So that today
the expression on the face of someone playing is the expression
on the face of a rebel. Henceforward, the total game and the revolution
of everyday life are one.

The desire to play has returned to destroy the hierarchical society
which banished it. At the same time it is setting up a new type
of society, one based on real participation. It is impossible
to foresee the details of such, a society - a society in which
play is completely unrestricted - but one could expect to see
the following characteristics:

- rejection of all leaders and all hierarchies;

- rejection of self-sacrifice;

- rejection of roles;

- freedom of genuine self-realisation;

- utter honesty.

*

Every game has two preconditions: the rules of playing and playing
with the rules. Watch children at play. They know the rules of
the game, they can remember them perfectly well but they never
stop breaking them, they never stop dreaming up new ways of breaking
them. But for them, cheating doesn't have the same connotations
as it does for adults. Cheating is part of the game, they play
at cheating, accomplices even in their arguments. What they are
really doing is spurring themselves on to create new games. And
sometimes they are successful: a new game is found and unfolds.
They revitalise their playfulness without interrupting its flow.

The game dies as soon as an authority crystallises, becomes institutionalised
and clothed in a magical aura. Even so playfulness, however lighthearted,
never loses a certain spirit of organisation and its required
discipline. If a play leader proves necessary, his power is never
wielded at the expense of the autonomous power of each individual.
Rather it is the focus of each individual will, the collective
counterpart of each particular desire. So the project of participation
demands a coherent organisation allowing the decisions of each
individual to be the decisions of everyone concerned. Obviously
small intimate groups, micro-societies, offer the best conditions
for such experiments. Within them the game can be the sole ruler
of the intricacies of communal life, harmonising individual whims,
desires and passions. Especially so since this game will reflect
the insurrectionary game played by the group as a whole, forced
upon them by their intention to live outside the law.

The urge to play is incompatible with self-sacrifice. You can
lose, pay the penalty, submit to the rules, spend an unpleasant
quarter of an hour, that's the logic of the game, not the logic
of a Cause, not the logic of self-sacrifice. Once the idea of
sacrifice appears the game becomes sacred and its rules become
rites. For those who play, the rules, along with the ways of playing
with them, are an integral part of the game. In the realm of the
sacred, on the contrary, rituals cannot be played with, they can
only be broken, can only be transgressed (not to forget that pissing
on the altar is still a way of paying homage to the Church). Only
play can deconsecrate, open up the possibilities of total freedom.
This is the principle of diversion, the freedom to change the
sense of everything which serves Power; the freedom, for example,
to turn the cathedral of Chartres into a fun-fair, into a labyrinth,
into a shooting-range, into a dream landscape...

In a group revolving around play, manual and domestic chores could
be allotted as penalties, as the price one pays for losing a point
in a game. Or, more simply. they could be used to employ unoccupied
time, as a sort of active rest; assuming, as a contrast, the value
of a stimulant and making the resumption of play more exciting.
The construction of such situations can only be based on the dialectic
of presence and absence, richness and poverty, pleasure and pain,
the intensity of each pole accentuating the intensity of the other.

In any case, any technique utilised in an atmosphere of sacrifice
and coercion loses much of its cutting edge. Its actual effectiveness
is mixed up with a purely repressive purpose, and to repress creativity
is to reduce the productivity of the machine repressing it. Work
can only be non-alienating and productive if you enjoy doing it.

The role one plays must be the role one plays with. The spectacular
role demands complete conviction; a lucid role, on the contrary,
demands a certain distanciation. One has to watch oneself over
one's own shoulder, in much the same sort of way that professional
actors like to swop jokes sotto voce in between two dramatic
tirades. Spectacular organisation is completely out of its depth
with this sort of thing. The Marx Brothers have shown what a role
can become if you play with it. The only pity is that the Marx
Brothers were stuck with the cinema. What would happen if a game
with roles started in real life?

When someone begins to play a permanent role, a serious role,
he either wrecks the game or it wrecks him. Consider the unhappy
case of the provocateur. The provocateur is the specialist in
collective games. He can grasp their techniques but not their
dialectic. Maybe he could succeed in steering the group towards
offensive action - for provocateurs always push people to attack
here and now - if only he wasn't so involved in his own role and
his own mission that he can never understand their need to defend
themselves. Sooner or later this incoherence in his attitude towards
offensive and defensive action will betray the provocateur, and
lead him to his untimely end. Add who makes the best provocateur?
The play leader who has become the boss.

Only desire to play can lead to a community whose interests are
identical with those of the individual. The traitor, unlike the
provocateur, appears quite spontaneously in revolutionary groups.
When does he appear? Whenever the spirit of play has died in a
group, and with it, inevitably, the possibility of real involvement.
The traitor is one who cannot express himself through the sort
of participation he is offered and decides to 'play' against this
participation,. not to correct but to destroy it. The traitor
is an illness of the old age of revolutionary groups. Selling
out on play is an act of treachery which justifies all others.

2

Tactics. Tactics are the polemical stage of the game. They
provide the necessary continuity between poetry as it is born
(play) and the organisation of spontaneity (poetry). Of an essentially
technical nature, they prevent spontaneity burning itself out
in the general confusion. We know how cruelly absent tactics have
been from most popular uprisings. And we also know just how offhand
historians can be about spontaneous revolutions. No serious study,
no methodical analysis, nothing approaching the level of Clausewitz's
book on war. Revolutionaries have ignored Makhno's battles almost
as thoroughly as bourgeois generals have studied Napoleon's.

A few observations, in the absence of a more detailed analysis.

An efficiently hierarchised army can win a war, but not a revolution;
an undisciplined mob can win neither. The problem then is how
to organise without creating a hierarchy; in other words, how
to make sure that the leader of the game doesn't become just "the
Leader". The only safeguard against authority and rigidity
setting in is a playful attitude. Creativity plus a machine gun
is an unstoppable combination. Villa and Makhno's troops routed
the most experienced professional soldiers of their day. But once
playfulness begins to repeat itself, the battle is lost. The revolution
fails so that its leader can be infallible. Why was Villa defeated
at Celaya? Because he fell back on old tactical and strategic
games, instead of making up new ones. Technically, Villa was carried
away by memories of Ciudad Juarez, where his men had fallen on
the enemy from the rear by silently cutting their way through
the walls of house after house. He failed to see the importance
of the military advances brought about by the 1914-18 war, machine
gun nests, mortars, trenches, etc. In political terms, he failed
to see the importance of gaining the support of the industrial
proletariat. It's no coincidence that Obregon's victorious army
which wiped out Villa's Dorados included both workers' militias
and German military advisers.

The strength of revolutionary armies lies solely in their creativity.
Frequently the first days of an insurrection are a walk-over simply
because nobody paid the slightest attention, to the rules by which
the enemy played the game: because they invented a new game and
because everyone took part in its elaboration. But if this creativity
flags, if it becomes repetitive, if the revolutionary army becomes
a regular army, then you can see blind devotion and hysteria try
in vain to make up for military weakness. Infatuation with past
victories breeds terrible defeats. The magic of the Cause and
the Leader replaces the conscious unity of the will to live and
the will to conquer. In 1525, having held the princes at bay for
two years, 40,000 peasants whose tactics had given way to religious
fanaticism, were hacked to pieces at Frankenhaussen; the feudal
army only lost three men. In 1964, at Stanleyville, hundreds of
Mulélists, convinced they were invincible, allowed themselves
to be massacred by throwing themselves on to a bridge defended
by two machine guns. Yet these were the same men who previously
had captured trucks and arms consignments from the A.N.C. by pitting
the roads with elephant traps.

Hierarchical organization and its counterpart, indiscipline and
incoherence, are equally inefficient. In a traditional war, the
inefficiency of one side overcomes the inefficiency of the other
through purely technical superiority; in revolutionary war, the
tactical poetry of the rebels steals from the enemy both their
weapons and the time in which to use them, thus robbing them of
their only possible superiority. But if the guerillas begin to
repeat themselves, the enemy can learn the rules of their game;
at which point counter-guerilla can, if not destroy, at least
badly damage a popular creativity which has already hobbled itself.

*

If troops are to refuse to kow-tow to leaders, how can the discipline
necessary for warfare be maintained? How can disintegration be
avoided? Revolutionary armies tend to oscillate between the Scylla
of devotion to a Cause and tile Charybdis of untimely pleasure
seeking.

Stirring pleas, in the name of freedom, for restraint and renunciation
lay the foundations of future slavery. But equally, premature
rejoicing and the quest for small pleasures are always followed
closely by the mailed fist of the bloody weeks of "restoring
order". Discipline and cohesion can only come from the pleasure
principle. The search for the greatest possible pleasure must
always run the risk of pain: this is the secret of its strength.
Where did the old troopers of the ancien régime
find the strength to besiege a town, be repulsed ten times and
still attack ten times more? In their passionate expectation of
festivity - in this case, it must be admitted, largely looting
and rape - of pleasure all the sweeter for having been attained
so slowly. The best tactics go hand in hand with anticipation
of future pleasure. The will to live, brutal and unrestrained,
is the fighter's deadliest secret weapon. A weapon which should
be used against anyone who endangers it: a soldier has every reason
to shoot his officers in the back. For the same reasons, revolutionary
armies will be stronger if they make each man a resourceful and
independent tactician; someone who takes his pleasures seriously..

In the coming struggles, the desire to live life to the full will
replace pillage as a motive. Tactics will merge with the science
of pleasure - for the search for pleasure is already pleasure
itself. Lessons in these tactics are given free every day. Anyone
who is ready to learn, from his everyday experience, what undermines
his independence and what makes him stronger, will gradually earn
his colours as a tactician.

However, no tactician is isolated. The will to destroy this sick
world calls for a federation of the tacticians of everyday life.
It's just such a federation that the S.I. intends to equip technically
without delay. Strategy is collectively building the launching-pad
of the revolution on the tactics of individual everyday life.

*

The ambiguous concept of 'humanity' sometimes causes spontaneous
revolutions to falter. All too often the desire to make man the
heart of a revolutionary programme has been invaded by a paralysing
humanism. How many times have revolutionaries spared the lives
of their own future firing-squad, how many times have they accepted
a truce which meant no more to their enemies than the opportunity
of gathering reinforcements? The ideology of humanity is a fine
weapon for counter-revolution, one which can justify the most
sickening atrocities (the Belgian paras in Stanleyville).

There can be no negotiation with the enemies of freedom, there's
no quarter which can be extended to man's oppressors. The annihilation
of counter-revolutionaries is the only 'humanitarian' act which
can prevent the ultimate inhumanity of an integrally bureaucratised
humanism.

Lastly: power must be totally destroyed by means of fragmentary
acts. The Struggle for purely economic emancipation has made survival
possible for everyone by making anything beyond survival impossible.
But the traditional workers movement was clearly struggling for
more than that: for a total change in people's way of life. In
any case, the wish to change the whole world at one go is a magical
wish, which is why it can so easily degenerate into the crudest
reformism. Apocalypticism and demands for gradual reform end up
by merging in the marriage of reconciled differences. It isn't
surprising that pseudo-revolutionary parties always end by pretending
that compromises are the same as tactics.

The revolution cannot be won either by accumulating minor victories
or by an all-out frontal assault. Guerilla war is total.

This is the path on which the S.I. is set: calculated harrassment
on every front - cultural, political, economic and social. Concentrating
on everyday life will ensure the unity of the combat.

3

Diversion. In its broadest sense, diversion is an all embracing
re-entry into play. It is the act by which play grasps
and reunites beings and things which were frozen solid in a shattered
hierarchic array.

One evening, as night fell, my friends and I wandered into the
Palais de Justice in Brussels. The building is a monstrosity,
crushing the poor quarters beneath it and guarding, like a sentry,
the fashionable Avenue Louise - out of which, some day, we will
make a breathtakingly beautiful bombsite. As we wandered through
the labyrinth of corridors, staircases, and suite after suite
of rooms, we discussed what could be done to make the place habitable;
for a time we occupied the enemies' territory; through the peer
of our imagination we transformed the thieves den into a fantastic
fun-falr, into a sunny pleasure dome, where the most amazing adventures
would, for the first time, be really lived. In short, diversion
is the basic expression of creativity. Day-dreaming diverts the
world. People divert, just as Jourdain did with prose and James
Joyce did with Ulysses, spontaneously and with considerable reflection.

It was in 1955 that Debord, struck by Lautréamont's systematic
use of diversion, first drew attention to the virtually unlimited
possibilities of the technique. In 1960, Jorn was to write: "Diversion
is a game which can only be played as everything loses its value.
Every element of past culture must either be reinvested in reality
or be scrapped." Debord, in Internationale Situationniste
no. 3, developed the concept still further: "The two basic
principles of diversion are the loss of importance of each originally
independent element (which may even lose its first sense completely),
and the organisatlon of a new significant whole which confers
a fresh meaning on each element." Recent history allows one
to be still more precise. From now on it's clear that:

- as more and more things rot and fall apart, diversion appears
spontaneously. Consumer society plays into the hands of those
who want to create new significant wholes;

- culture is no longer a particularly privileged theatre. The
art of diversion can be an integral part of any rebellion against
the nature of everyday life;

- since part-truths rule our world, diversion is now the only
technique at the service of a total view. As a revolutionary act,
diversion is the most coherent, most popular and the best adapted
to revolutionary practice. By a sort of natural evolution - the
desire to play - it leads people to become more and more extreme,
more and more radical.

*

Our experience is falling to pieces about our ears, and its disintegration
is a direct consequence of the development of consumer society.
The phase of devaluation, and thus the possibility of diversion,
is the work of contemporary history. Diversion has become part
of the tactics of supersession; an essentially positive act.

While the abundance of consumer goods is hailed everywhere as
a major step forward in evolution, the way these goods are used
by society, as we know, invalidates all their positive aspects.
Because the gadget is primarily a source of profit for
capitalism and the socialist bureaucracies, it cannot be used
for any other ends. The ideology of consumerism acts like a fault
in its manufacture, it sabotages the commodity coated in it; it
turns what could be the material equipment of happiness into a
new form of slavery. In this context, diversion broadcasts new
ways of using commodities; it invents superior uses of
goods, uses by which subjectivity can strengthen itself with something
that was originally marketed to weaken it. The problems of tactics
and strategy revolve around our ability to turn against capitalism
the weapons that commercial necessity has forced it to distribute.
Methods of diversion should be spread as an ABC Of The Consumer
Who Wishes To Stop Being So.

Diversion, which forged its first weapons from art, has now become
the art of handling every sort of weapon. Having first appeared
amidst the cultural crisis of the years 1910-25, it has gradually
spread to every area touched by social decomposition. Despite
which, art still offers a field of valid experiment for the techniques
of diversion; and there's still much to be learnt from the past.
Surrealism failed because it tried to reinvest dadaist anti-values
which had not been completely reduced to zero. Any other attempt
to build on values which have not been thoroughly purged by a
nihilistic crisis will end in the same way; with recuperation.
Contemporary cyberneticians have taken their 'combinatory' attitude
towards art so far as to believe in the value of any accumulation
of disparate elements whatsoever, even if the particular elements
haven't been devalued at all. Pop Art or Jean-Luc Godard,
it's the same apologetics of the junk-yard.

Diversion, self-critical language, is our only possible means
of communication. There are no limits to creativity. There is
no end to diversion.

XXIV THE INTERWORLD AND THE NEW INNOCENCE

The interworld is the no-man's land of subjectivity, where
power's waste products corrode and mingle with the will to live
(1). The new innocence frees the monsters inside us, pitting the
interworld's stormy violence against the old established order
of things, which gave it birth (2).

1

On the fringes of uneasy subjectivity the canker of power eats
away. There thrives undying hate, the demons of revenge, the tyranny
of envy, the rancour of frustrated desire. It may be a marginal
infection, but it threatens every side; an interworld.

The interworld is the no-man's land of subjectivity. Its borders
tremble with the fundamental cruelty of cop and rebel, oppression
and the poetry of revolt. Halfway between its recuperation by
the spectacle and its revolutionary use, the dreamer's extra-space-time
spawns monstrous creations after the image of his own desires
and that of power. The increasing poverty of daily life has turned
into a sort of public amenity suitable for every kind of investigation,
an open battlefield between creative spontaneity and what corrupts
it. As a faithful explorer of the mind, Artaud sums up perfectly
this evenly-matched struggle: "My unconscious is only mine
in dreams, but are the forms I see there going to come to birth
or are they some foul abortion I've spewed up? The subconscious
is shaped by the premises of my interior will, but I'm not really
sure who reigns there; I don't believe it's me, but rather a flood
of conflicting desires which, I don't know why, think in me and
do nothing but struggle endlessly for total possession over me.
But I re-encounter every one of these perverse desires, whose
temptations treat me with such temerity, in the preconscious -
only this time all my conscious wits are about me, and although
the perverse desires break in waves over me, the important thing
is that I feel myself there... I feel therefore that if I travelled
upstream, I ought to emerge in my preconscious at the point where
I could see myself evolve and desire." Further on,
Artaud says: "Peyote led me there."

The adventures of the hermit of Rodez sound off a warning. His
break with the Surrealist movement is a turning point. He charged
them with getting caught up in Bolshevism; with serving a revolution
- which be it mentioned in passing, drags Kronstadt's corpses
along with it - instead of making the revolution serve them. Artaud
was absolutely right to blame the helplessness of the movement
on its failure to base its revolutionary coherence on its richest
truth - subjectivity before everything. But no sooner had he broken
with Surrealism than he veered off into solipsistic madness and
magic. He was no longer interested in realising his subjective
desire by transforming the world. Instead of externalising what
lies inside, he did the opposite, and made it holy, finding in
the solid world of analogies the eternal primal myth, to which
revelation only the roads of impotence lead. Those who are reluctant
to cast out the flames that devour them are just asking to get
burnt, consumed, according to the laws of the consumable, in the
Nessus' shirt of ideology - be it of drugs, art, psychoanalysis,
theosophy or revolution, it never ever changes history.

*

The imaginary is the exact science of possible solutions, not
a parallel world granted the mind to compensate for its failures
in outside reality. It is a power that will fill the abyss separating
inside and outside. A praxis condemned to inaction.

With its ghosts, its obsessions, its vitriolic outbursts and its
sadism, the interworld seems to be a cage full of savage animals
driven wild by imprisonment. Anyone is free to go down there by
means of dreams, drugs, alcohol and other sense derangers. There's
a violence there that's just asking to be freed, and a climate
in which one should steep oneself, if only to attain this consciousness
which dances and kills; what Norman O. Brown calls dionysiac
consciousness.

2

The bloody dawn of riots doesn't dissolve the monstrous creatures
of the night. It clothes them in light and fire, and scatters
them through towns and across the countryside. The new innocence
is baleful dreams come true. Subjectivity only constructs itself
by destroying what hampers it, and the violence necessary to this
end is drawn from the interworld. The new innocence is the lucid
construction of annihilation.

The most peaceful of men are full of bloody dreams. We know the
price of treating solicitously those whom we can't strike down
now, using kindness when we can't use force. I owe a great weight
of hatred to those who've failed to break me. How can we liquidate
hate without liquidating its causes? In the barbarity of riots,
the arson, the popular savagery, the excesses that terrify bourgeois
historians, we find exactly the right vaccine against the cold
atrocity of the forces of order and hierarchical oppression.

In the new innocence, the interworld suddenly erupts and submerges
oppressive structures. The game of nothing-but violence is engulfed
by the everything-and violence of the revolutionary game.

The shock of freedom works miracles. Nothing can resist it, neither
mental illness, remorse, guilt, the feeling of powerlessness,
nor the brutalisation created by the environment of power. When
a waterpipe burst in Pavlov's laboratory, not one of the dogs
that survived the flood retained the slightest trace of his long
conditioning. Could the tidal wave of great social upheavals have
less effect on men than a burst waterpipe on dogs?, Reich recommends
explosions of anger for emotionally blocked and muscularly armoured
neurotics. This type of neurosis seems particularly prevalent
today: it's survival sickness. The most coherent explosion of
anger has a great chance of being a general uprising.

Three thousand years of living in the shadows can't withstand
ten days of revolutionary violence. The reconstruction of society
will simultaneously reconstruct everyone's unconscious.

*

The revolution of everyday life will blot out ideas of justice,
punishment and torture, which are notions dependent on exchange
and fragmentation. We don't want to be judges, but, by destroying
slavery, masters without slaves recovering a new innocence and
gracefulness in living. We have to destroy the enemy, not judge
him. Whenever Durruti's column freed a village, they would assemble
the peasants, ask which were the Fascists and shoot them on the
spot. The next revolution will do the same. With perfect composure.
We know there'll be no-one to judge us, nor will there ever be
judges again, because we will have gobbled them up.

The new innocence entails destroying an order of things that has
always tried to pin down the art of living and which today is
threatening what remains of authentically lived experience. I
don't need reasons to defend my freedom.

But at every moment power is legally defending me, (as I am legally
defending myself against it!) In this brief exchange between the
anarchist Duval and the policeman sent to arrest him, the new
innocence can recognise its spontaneous jurisprudence:
"Duval, I arrest you in the name of the law."
"And I suppress you in the name of freedom."

Things don't bleed. Those heavy with the dead weight of things
will die the death of things. Victor Serge recounts that during
the sack of Razoumovskoe the revolutionaries smashed some porcelain;
and when they were criticised for having done so, they replied:
"We'll smash all the porcelain in the world to transform
life. You love things too much and people too little... You love
men too much the way you love things, and man you don't love enough."
What we don't need to destroy is worth saving: that's the most
succinct version of our future penal code.

XXV YOU'RE FUCKING AROUND WITH US? - NOT FOR LONG!

(Address by the sans-culottes of the rue Mouffetard
to the National Convention, December 9th, 1792)

In Watts, Prague, Stockholm, Stanleyville, Gdansk, Turin, Port
Talbot, Cleveland, Cordoba, Amsterdam, wherever the act and wareness
of refusal generates passionate break-outs from the factories
of collective illusion, the revolution of everyday life is under
way. The struggle intensifies as misery becomes universal. What
for years were reasons for fighting specific issues - hunger,
restrictions, boredom, illness, anxiety, isolation, deceit - now
reveal misery's fundamental rationality, its omnipresent emptiness,
its appalling oppressive abstraction. For this misery, the world
of hierarchical power, the world of the State, of sacrifice, exchange
and the quantitative - the commodity as will and representation
of the world - is held responsible by those moving towards an
entirely new society that is still to be invented and yet is already
among us. All over the globe, revolutionary praxis, like
a photographic exposer, is transforming negative into positive,
lighting up the hidden face of the earth with the fires of rebellion
to ink in the map of its triumph.

Only genuine revolutionary praxis gives the organisation
of armed revolt the precision without which even the best proposals
remain tentative and partial. But this same praxis shows
a rapid corruption the moment it breaks with its own rationality.
That rationality is not abstract but concrete supersession of
that universal and empty form, the commodity - and is alone in
allowing a non-alienating objectification: the realization of
art and philosophy in the individual's daily life. Such a rationality's
line of force and extension is born of the deliberate encounter
of two poles under tension. It's the spark struck off between
subjectivity, extracting the will to be everything from the totalitarianism
of oppressive conditions, and the historical withering way of
the generalised commodity system.

Existential conflicts are not qualitatively different from those
inherent in the whole of mankind. That's why men can't hope to
control the laws governing their general history if they can't
simultaneously control their own individual histories. If you
go for revolution and neglect your own self, then you're going
about it backwards, like all the militants. Against voluntarism
and the mystique of the historically inevitable revolution, we
must spread the idea of a plan of attack, and a means, both rational
and passionate, in which immediate subjective needs and objective
contemporary conditions are dialectically united. In the dialectic
of part and totality, the curved slope of revolution is
the project to construct daily life in and through the struggle
against the commodity form, so that each phase of the revolution
is carried in the style of its final outcome. No maximum program,
no minimum program, and no transitional programme - instead a
complete strategy based on the essential characteristics of the
system we want destroyed.

Between the increasingly disorganised old society and the new
society yet to be created, the Situationist International offers
an example of a group in search of its revolutionary coherence.
As with all groups bearing the seeds of poetry, its importance
is as a model for the new social organisation. It must therefore
prevent external oppression (hierarchy, bureaucratisation...)
reappearing inside the movement, by insuring that participation
is subordinated to the maintenance of real equality between all
its members, not as a metaphysical right, but on the contrary
as the norm to attain. It is precisely to avoid authoritarianism
and passivity (leaders and militants) that the group should unhesitatingly
move against any compromise, drop in the theoretical level or
lack of practical activity. We can't tolerate people whom the
dominant regime so happily puts up with. Exclusion and rupture
are the only defences of coherence in danger.

In the same way, the project of centralising scattered poetry
involves the ability to recognise or encourage autonomous revolutionary
groups, radicalise them, and federate them without ever taking
them over. The Situationist International has an axial function:
to be everywhere the ax which popular agitation wields and which
in turn amplifies the initial movement. The Situationists will
recognise these groups on the basis of their revolutionary coherence.

The moment of revolt, which means now, is hallowing out
for us in the hard rock of our daily lives, days that miraculously
retain the delicious colours and the dreamlike charm which - like
an Aladdin's cave, magical and prismatic in an atmosphere all
its own - is inalienably ours. The moment of revolt is childhood
rediscovered, time put to everyone's use, the dissolution of the
market and the beginning of generalised self-management.

The long revolution is creating small federated microsocieties,
true guerilla cells practising and fighting for this self-management.
Effective radicality authorises all variations and guarantees
every freedom. That's why the Situationists don't confront the
world with: "Here's your ideal organisation, on your knees!"
They simply show by fighting for themselves and with the clearest
awareness of this fight, why people really fight each other and
why they must acquire an awareness of the battle.

(1963 - 1965)

raoul Vaneigem

Just as in the case of a child, the first breath it draws
after long silent nourishment terminates the gradualness of the
merely quantitative progression - a qualitative leap - and now
the child is born, so, too, the spirit that educates itself matures
slowly and quietly toward the new form, dissolving one particle
of the edifice of its previous world after the other. This gradual
crumbling which did not alter the physiognomy of the whole is
interrupted by the break of day that, like lightning, all at once
reveals the edifice of the new world.

HEGEL

When I write down my thoughts, they do not escape me.
This act reminds me of my strength, which I forget always. I teach
myself in proportion to my enslaved thoughts. I strive only to
understand the contradiction between my soul and nothingness.

LAUTRÉAMONT

Control can never be a means to any practical end... It
can never be a means to anything but more control... like junk...

WILLIAM BURROUGHS

Sleepers awake. Sleep is separateness: the cave of solitude
is the cave of dreams, the cave of the passive spectator. To be
awake is to participate, carnally and not in fantasy, in the feast.

NORMAN O. BROWN

APPENDIX

EXTRACTS FROM: SOME ADVICE CONCERNING GENERALISED SELF-MANAGEMENT

"Never sacrifice a present good to a future good. Enjoy
the moment; don't get into anything which doesn't satisfy your
passions right away. Why should you work today for jam tomorrow,
since you will be loaded down with it anyway, and in fact in the
new order you will only have one problem, namely how to find enough
time to get through all the pleasures in store for you?

Charles Fourier, Some Advice Concerning the Next Social
Metamorphosis.

In their failure, the occupations of May 1968 created a confused
popular awareness of the need for change. The universal, feeling
that total transformation is just round the corner must now find
its practice: the move forward to generalised self-management
through the setting up of workers' councils. The point to which
consciousness has been brought by revolutionary high spirits must
now become the point of departure.

Today, history is answering the question which Lloyd George asked
the workers, and the old world's servants have been echoing ever
since: "You want to destroy our social organisation, what
are you going to put in its place?" We know the answer now,
thanks to the profusion of little Lloyd Georges who advocate the
State dictatorship of the proletariat of their choice, and then
wait for the working class to organise itself in councils, so
that they can dissolve it and elect another one.

Each time the proletariat takes the risk of changing the world,
it rediscovers the memory of history. The reality of the past
possibilities of a society of councils, which has been hidden
by the history of the repeated suppression of such a society,
is revealed by the possibility of its immediate realization. This
was made clear to all workers in May; Stalinism and its Trotskyist
turds showed that, although they wouldn't have had the energy
to crush a vigorous council movement, they were still able to
hold up its emergence by sheer deadweight. Nevertheless, the workers'
council movement discovered itself as the necessary resultant
of two opposing forces: the internal logic of the occupations
and the repressive logic of the parties and trade unions. Those
who still open their Lenin to find out what is to be done are
sticking their heads in a dustbin.

A great many people rejected any organisation that was not the
direct creation of the proletariat in the process of destroying
itself as proletariat, and this rejection was inseparable from
the feeling that a daily life without dead time was at last possible.
In this sense the idea of workers' councils is the first principle
of generalised self-management.

May was an essential step in the long revolution: the individual
history of millions of people, all looking for an authentic life,
joining up with the historical movement of the proletariat fighting
against the whole system of alienation. This spontaneous
unity in action, which was the passionate motor of the occupation
movement, can only develop its theory and practice in the same
unity. What was in everyone's heart will soon be in everyone's
head. A lot of people who felt that they "couldn't go on
living the same old way, not even if things were a bit better"
can remember what it was like to really live for a while
and to believe that great changes were possible. And this memory
would become a revolutionary force with the help of one thing:
a greater lucidity about the historical construction of free
individual relationships, generalised self-management.

Only the proletariat can create the project of generalised self-management
by refusing to carry on existing as the proletariat. It carries
this project in itself objectively and subjectively. So the first
steps will come from the merging together of its historical battles
and the struggle for daily life; and from the awareness that all
its demands are obtainable right away, hut only if it grants them
itself. In this sense the importance of a revolutionary
organisation must be measured from now on by its ability to dissolve
itself into the reality of the society of workers' councils.

Workers' councils constitute a new type of social organisation,
one by which the proletariat will put an end to the proletarianisation
of all men. Generalised self-management is simply the totality
according to which the councils will create a style of life based
on permanent liberation, which is at once individual and collective.

It is clear from the preceding that the project of generalised
self-management must involve as many details as each revolutionary
has desires, and as many revolutionaries as there are people dissatisfied
with their daily life. Spectacular commodity society produces
the contradictions which suppress subjectivity, but this also
leads to the refusal which frees the positivity of subjectivity;
in the same way, the formation of councils, which also arises
in the struggle against general oppression, is the basis for the
conditions for a general realization of subjectivity, without
any limits but its own impatience to make history. So generalised
self-management means the ability of workers' councils to historically
realise the imagination.

Without generalised self-management, workers' councils lose all
significance. We must treat as a future bureaucrat, and therefore
as a present enemy, anyone who speaks of workers' councils as
economic or social organisms, anyone who doesn't put them at the
centre of daily life: with the practice which this involves.

One of Fourier's great merits is that he showed us that we must
create in the here-and-now - which means, for us, at the beginning
of the general insurrection - the objective conditions for individual
liberation. For everyone, the beginning of the revolutionary moment
must bring an immediate increase in the pleasure of living:
a consciously lived beginning of totality.

The accelerating rate at which reformism, with its tricontinental
bellyache, is leaving ridiculous little turds behind it (all those
little piles of Maoists, Trotskyists, Guevarists, 'revolutionary'
ecologists) shows everyone what the right, especially socialists
and Stalinists, have suspected for a long time: partial demands
contain in themselves the impossibility of a total change. Rather
than fight one reformism and conceal another, the temptation to
turn the old trick inside-out like a bureaucrat's skin has all
the marks of the final solution of the problem of recuperation.
This implies a strategy moving towards general upheaval through
more and more frequent insurrectionary moments; and tactics involving
a qualitative break, in which necessarily partial actions each
contain, as their necessary and sufficient condition, the liquidation
of the commodity world. It is time to begin the positive sabotage
of spectacular commodity society. As long as our mass tactics
are based on the law of immediate pleasure, there will be no need
to worry about the consequences.

It's easy to write down a few suggestions which the practice of
liberated workers will soon show the poverty of: inaugurating
the realm of gratuitousness at every opportunity openly during
strikes, more or less clandestinely at other times - by giving
the products in factories and warehouses away to friends and revolutionaries,
making presents (radio transmitters, toys, weapons, all kinds
of machines), organizing give-aways of the goods in department
stores; breaking the laws of exchange and beginning the abolition
of wage-labour by collectively appropriating the products
of work, collectively using the machines for personal and revolutionary
purposes; devaluing money by generalised payment strikes
(rent, taxes, hire-purchase instalments, fares etc.); encouraging
everybody's creativity by starting up the production and distribution
sectors, perhaps intermittently, but only under workers'
control, and looking upon this as a necessarily hesitant but perfectable
exercise; abolishing hierarchies and the spirit of sacrifice,
by treating bosses (and union bosses) as they deserve, and rejecting
militantism; acting together everywhere against all separations;
getting the theory out of every practice, and vice versa by
the production of handouts, posters, songs, etc.

The proletariat has already shown that it knows how to answer
the oppressive complexity of capitalist and 'socialist' states
with the simplicity of organisation managed directly by
everyone and for everyone. In our times, the problems of survival
are only asked on condition that they can never be solved; on
the other hand, the problems of history which is to be lived are
stated clearly in the project of workers' councils, at once as
positivity and as negativity; in other words as the basis of a
unitary-passionate society, and as anti-State.

Because they exercise no power separate from the decision of their
members, workers' councils cannot tolerate any power other than
their own. That's why advocating universal demonstrations against
the State won't mean the premature creation of councils. Without
absolute power in their own area, and separated from generalised
self-management, councils would necessarily be empty of content
and ready to mess around with all kinds of ideology. Today, the
only forces lucid enough to respond to the history that is
made with the history that is ready to be made will
be revolutionary organisations which can develop, in the project
of workers' councils, an adequate awareness of who are enemies
and who are allies. An important aspect of this struggle has already
appeared before our eyes: dual power. In factories, offices,
streets, houses, barracks, and schools a new reality is materialising:
contempt must develop until it reaches its logical conclusion:
the concerted initiative of workers must discover that the bosses
are not only contemptible but also useless and, what is more,
can be liquidated without any ill effects.

Recent history will soon come to be seen by both revolutionaries
and bosses in terms of a single alternative; generalised self-management
or insurrectionary chaos; the new society of abundance or "things
fall apart", terrorism, looting, repression. Duel-power situations
already illustrate this choice. Coherence demands that the paralysis
and destruction of all forms of government must not be distinct
from the construction of councils; if the enemy have any sense
at all they will have to adapt to the fact that this new organisation
of daily relationships is all that will be able to stop the spread
of what an American police specialist has already called "our
nightmare": little rebel commandos bursting out of subway
entrances, shooting from the rooftops, using the ability and infinite
resources of the urban guerilla to kill policemen, liquidate authority's
servants, fan up riots, destroy the economy. But it is not our
job to save the bosses against their will. All we have to do is
prepare councils and make sure that they can defend themselves
by all possible means. In a play by Lope de Vega some villagers
kill a despotic royal official; when they are hauled before investigating
magistrates all that the villagers will say under examination
is the name of the village, Fuenteovejuna. The only thing wrong
with the Fuenteovejuna plan, beloved of Asturian miners, is that
it echoes too much of terrorism and banditry. Generalised self-management
will be our Fuenteovejuna. It is not enough for a collective action
to avoid repression (imagine the impotence of the forces of law
and order if the bank clerks who occupied their banks had appropriated
the funds), it must also and in the same movement lead towards
a greater revolutionary coherence. Workers' councils are order
in the face of the decomposition of the State, challenged in its
form by the rise of regionalism and in its principle by sectoral
demands. The police can only answer its questions with lists of
their fatalities. Only workers' councils offer a definitive answer.
What will put a stop to looting? The organization of distribution,
and the end of commodity exchange. What will prevent sabotage
and waste? The appropriation of machines by the creativity of
the collective. What will put an end to explosions of anger and
violence? The abolition of the proletariat by means of the collective
justification for our construction of daily life. The only justification
for our struggle is the immediate satisfaction of this project:
which is whatever defines us immediately.

Generalised self-management will have only one source of support:
the exhilaration of universal freedom. This is quite enough to
make us absolutely certain about some preliminary matters, which
our revolutionary organisations will have to get straight. Likewise,
their practice will already involve the experience of direct democracy.
This will allow us to pay more attention to certain slogans. For
example, "All power to the general assembly" implies
that whatever escapes the direct control of the autonomous assembly
will recreate, in mediated forms, all the autonomous varieties
of oppression. The whole assembly with all its tendencies must
be present through its representatives at the moment when decisions
are made. Even if the destruction of the State prevents a revival
of the farce of the Supreme Soviet, we must still make sure that
our organisation is so simple that no neo-bureaucracy can possibly
arise. But the complexity of communication techniques (which might
appear to be a pretext for the survival or return of specialists)
is just what makes possible the continuous control of delegates
by the base - the confirmation/correction/rejection of their decisions
at all levels. So base groups must always have teleprinters, televisions,
etc.: their ubiquity must be realised.

The logic of the commodity system, sustained by alienated practice,
must be confronted by the social logic of desires and its immediate
practice. As the transformation of the world becomes identified
with the construction of life, necessary work will disappear in
the pleasure of History-for-itself.

To affirm that the councils' organisation of distribution and
production will prevent looting and wholesale destruction of machinery
and stores, is to continue to define oneself solely in terms of
the anti-State. The councils, as the organisation of the new society,
will do away with all remaining separations by their collective
politics of desire. Wage-labour can be ended the moment the councils
start functioning - the moment the "equipment and supplies"
section of each council has organized production and distribution
along the lines desired by the full assembly. At this point, in
homage to the best part of Bolshevik foresight, urinals built
of solid gold and silver can be built, and baptised "lenins".

One cannot, as Fourier did, rely exclusively on the. magnetic
quality of the first communes; but, at the same time, one cannot
afford to underestimate the power to seduce exercised by every
attempt at authentic liberation. The self-defence of the councils
could be summed up by the maxim: "Armed truth is revolutionary".

(Extracts from a translation by Chris Whitbread of "Avis
aux clvilisés relativement a l'autogestion généralisée"
by Raoul Vaneigem in Internationale Situationniste no.
12, September 1969.)

The upholders of the profit hierarchy,
of social and bourgeois institutions
who never worked
but accumulated for thousands of years, bit by bit, the
stolen goods,
and keep them holed up in certain caves of powers defended
by all humanity,
with a small number of exceptions,
will be forced to deploy their energy
and therefore fight
and they will be incapable of not fighting
for it's their eternal cremation which is coming at the
end of the war, this apocalyptic war coming on.

ANTONIN ARTAUD

A FOOTNOTE ON PRACTICAL TRUTH

Raoul Vaneigem joined the Situationist International in 1961 and
immediately shared and developed its most extreme positions. The
S.I. of the years 1961 to 1964, an important period for the S.I.
and the ideas of the modern revolution, was heavily marked by
him, more perhaps than by any other. This period saw the general
formulation of the most total revolutionary program. The revolution,
the return of which the Situationists announced, was then completely
absent. A certain generality and abstraction, and the occasional
lyrical excess, found in The Revolution of Everyday Life
and other texts of the time, were the inevitable products of these
precise conditions, and were both justified and excellent. Modern
history followed the course foreseen: the Situationists entered
with their epoch the increasingly concrete struggles which continue
to develop. Vaneigem was already not there.

Today [1975], the S.I. has, as far as we know, a membership of
between two and four. The only major text of the S.I. In five
years is The Real Break in the International (1972) by
Debord and Sanguinetti, which has a good critique of the contemplative
attitude around and within the S.I. (the ideology of situationism),
but remains silent on the vital issues of organisational practice,
and the precise relationship of revolutionary organisations to
present historical struggles. (There is a very poor translation
available, called The Veritable Split in the International.)

The S.I. reached theoretical maturity in 1966 with the completion
of the major works by Debord and Vaneigem, The Society of the
Spectacle and The Revolution of Everyday Life; and
the movement of occupations in May 1968 can now be seen as the
conclusion of the S.I.'s long practical research, without being
its supersession. The more important the objective place of the
S.I. in present history became, the more perilous its heritage
for each member to bear. The danger of spectacular integration
as one more novelty was very real. "An inevitable part of
the historical success of the S.I. led it in turn to be contemplated,
and through such contemplation the uncompromising critique of
everything that exists came to be positively appreciated
by an everbroadening sector of impotence that had become pro-revolutionary."
(Real Break, thesis 22). Throughout history, the S.I. had
always fought followers and admirers as the inevitable bearers
of confusion and hierarchy; in a similar way as the Mediaeval
hermetic groups seeking techniques of liberation. In 1964 the
S.I. members stated that "we absolutely refuse disciples.
We are only interested in participation at the highest level;
and we let loose upon the world those who are their own masters."
(Le Questionnaire, I.S. no. 9). It is also important that
"Situationists have no monopoly to defend or reward to count
on," as Debord said in 1969 (I.S. no. 12, page 114).

Enthusiastic supporters of the S.I. had existed since 1960, but
the first significant "pro-situationists" because they
were actually within the S.I. - were the Garnautins, excluded
soon after the Strasbourg scandal in 1966 (see Ten Days That
Shook The University by the S.I.). By this time, the era of
S.I. development when the megalomaniac tone was adopted as a reaction
to general incomprehension and hostility had passed. Its legacy
was an absurd Situationist prestige which was usually a stance
to hide deficiencies, an inability to experiment and take risks.
This is not to say that there were some for whom prestige was
not well deserved.

But Vaneigem wanted to make of the S.I. not only a revolutionary
organisation, but one of sublime, even absolute, excellence. ("On
the level of the group, the purification of the centre and the
elimination of residues now seem to be completed... In the same
way as God formed the reference point of past unitary society,
we are preparing to create the central reference point of a unitary
society bow possible." From The Totality for Kids
by Vaneigem, 1963.) His programme was formulated only to spare
himself all the fatigues and little historlcal risks of its realisation.
Since the goal is total, it's only envisioned in a pure present:
it is already here as a whole, or else it remains purely
inaccessable. He remained in the S.I., propped up on his past
authentic participation and the ever receding promise of future
accomplishment. He behaved as if intersubjective coherence would
one day fall fully grown from the sky on the Situationists' shoulders;
but it never did. While the language used became more and more
wooden, the mass of admirers flocked to "the image of extreme
heroes gathered together in a triumphant community". In this
atmosphere, the tactical debate of 1969-70 got bogged down in
boredom and bitterness, with numerous splits and exclusions taking
place. Vaneigem resigned in 1970.

In his Theses on 0rganisation (April 1968), Debord had
said: "The S.I. must now prove its effectiveness in an ulterior
stage of revolutionary activity - or else disappear." Well,
to all intents and purposes, it has disappeared. It had set itself
precise tasks in a precise period, and was indeed an historical
phenomenon, in spite of the pro-situationist myth of an ideal
model revolutionary organisation; and its achievements have been
vast. May the Situationists cease to be admired as if they were
superior to their time; and may the epoch be terrified by admiring
itself for what it is.

A number of groups around the world claim to continue - even to
supersede - the project begun by the S.I.; many have been unable
to lift themselves clear of the pro-situationist quagmire. Nonetheless,
"the symptoms of revolutionary crisis are accumulating by
the thousand, and their seriousness is such that the spectacle
is now obliged to talk about its own ruin." (Real
Break, thesis lO). "What we have said about art, the
proletariat, urbanism and the spectacle is blared out everywhere
minus the essential" (Vaneigem, 1970).

The Revolution of Everyday Life has entered a current of
agitation which continues. Its importance should escape no-one,
for no-one, not even Vaneigem, will be able to escape its conclusions.

*

We translated this book in 1972. The first few chapters had already
appeared in English as pamphlets, and needed little alteration;
rough drafts of later sections have travelled great distances
and provided potent graffiti for walls and. ephemera from the
turbulent and expanding currents of insurrection and agitation.
We have used, with minor alterations, Chris Gray's translations
of Chapter XVIII (Section 4) and Chapter XXIII. The former first
appeared in King Mob Echo as Desolation Row (1968);
both are now included in his recent anthology Leaving The 20th
Century (wherein is included our translation of Chapter 5
of Debord's Society of the Spectacle).

It's time we united heads, hearts and bodies to render obsolete
de Sade's definition of society as "a collection of people
whom boredom brings together and stupidity modifies". It
goes without saying that we have no interests in the opinions
of professional commentators or guardians of the Holy Situationist
Grail. If they remain satisfied with their roles, then the book
is beyond their comprehension. "To those who can't keep up
with us we prefer those who reject us impatiently because our
language isn't yet authentic poetry, that is, the free construction
of daily life."

JOHN FULLERTON
PAUL SIEVEKING

The Revolution of Everyday Lifetook the side of supersession by inciting proletarians to
seize hold of the theory drawn from what is lived and not lived
every day; but the delay in its insurrectionary use exposes it
to a whole range of falsifications. The diversity of its ideologists
extend from subjectivists to nihilists, via communitarians and
apolitical hedonists. Consciousness without use can only justify
itself as a used-up consciousness. The best that the subjective
expression of the Situationist project was able to give during
the preparation for May 1968 and in understanding the new forms
of exploitation has since become the worst in intellectual reading.
Radical theory belongs to whoever improves on it. The evidence
of the Traité's major theses must now manifest itself
in the hands of its anti-readers through concrete results. Theory
must bring violence to where violence already is.

(From Toast to the Revolutionary Workers - Postscript
to the Traité by Raoul Vaneigem, October 1972.)

[originally published byPRACTICAL PARADISE PUBLICATIONS and printed (extremely badly) by the community
press, St.Pauls Road, London]

Do what you will this world's a fiction
And is made up of contradiction.WILLIAM BLAKE

We are not asking you to be humble or proud... Do not
forget that you are a nocturnal amalgamation of caves, forests,
marshes, red rivers, populated with huge and fabulous bbeasts
who devour each other. It's nothing to show off about.